With the formal commercial launch towards the end of this year, Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd aims to make fibre-to-home its next battleground.
Reliance Jio has started beta trials for its wired broadband service at few places in India. Free broadband services have been provided in places like New Delhi and Mumbai with an unlimited internet speed of 100 mbps along with a security deposit of Rs 4,500.
A recent Blomberg report has stated that CLSA India, a brokerage firm expects that before interest, depreciation and amortization hits in three years by the roll-out of broadband internet services, Reliance is expecting a boost of Rs 4,000 crore. Another possible factor leading to a boost in Jio’s effort is the low penetration of wired internet services.
Various other sources states that Airtel which is a major Jio rival offers its customers a high-speed wired broadband up to 100 mbps to 2.1 million users across 89 cities in India. As per data available, till December 2017, the average revenue of Airtel per user from its ‘Homes Services’ segment was Rs948. Whereas the broadband customers account for 93.5% of its ‘Homes Services’ segment.
Last week, to play up more in the telecom sector Airtel has introduced an all new superfast home broadband plan with speeds of up to 300 mbps at a monthly rental of Rs2,990 with 1,200GB of data. Reportedly this plan comes with free subscription to Airtel’s OTT apps—Wynk Music and Airtel TV.
Livemint stated that according to data released by Trai, there are 156 internet service providers in India as of December 2017 and even without its formal presence in the wired internet segment, Jio has the maximum share of overall internet subscribers with 35.9 percent of the market share followed by Bharti Airtel at 22.12 percent.
