Jio AirFiber launch on Ganesh Chaturthi: Mukesh Ambani

Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani on Monday revealed that the company will launch Jio AirFiber – its wireless broadband offering – on the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi on September 19, 2023, as it looks to boost its revenues from the untapped home segment.

"Through optical fibre, we can currently connect around 15,000 premises daily. But with JioAirFiber, we can supercharge this expansion with up to 150,000 connections per day which is a 10-fold increase, expanding our addressable market over the next three years to over 200 million high-paying homes and premises," Ambani says at RIL's 46^th annual general meeting (AGM).

Jio AirFiber uses Jio's pan-India 5G network and wireless technologies to bypass the need for last-mile fibre.

JioFiber, the company's wired broadband service, has crossed 10 million subscribers across the country.

Ambani says RIL has invested $150 billion in the last 10 years, higher than any corporate in India.

"When we look at the geopolitical and economic situation, there are dark clouds of uncertainty hovering around us. However, there is also one sharp, unmistakable ray of certainty. The certainty that India will rise as a leading nation in our increasingly multi-polar world," Ambani says.

RIL contributed ₹1,77,173 crore to the country's exchequer in the last fiscal while its corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending stood at ₹1,271 crore.

Reliance Industries added 2.6 lakh jobs in FY23, taking the conglomerate's total workforce to 3.9 lakh on-roll employees.

Jio's customer base rose to 450 million subscribers with users consuming 25GB of data every month. Jio has been the main catalyst of India's digital transformation, says Ambani. Jio 5G is already present in 92% of India's census towns.

"Jio is the operator of choice for mobile users. Our net port-ins via Mobile Number Portability was five times than that of our nearest competitor," says Ambani.

"With over 50 million 5G customers, we're already leading in 5G adoption in India. And we are the only company with the capacity to smoothly transition our entire 4G customer base to 5G, with minimal additional capital expenditure. With the growing adoption of Jio 5G, we are also seeing an increasing trend of high-ARPU, post-paid customers choosing Jio as their preferred network," the RIL chairman says, adding that the new Reliance has been a forerunner for an ambitious new India.

"When we launched our 4G services in 2016, we relied on global partners for equipment. Today, our 5G rollout is powered by Jio's own 100% in-house developed 5G stack, which perfectly aligns with our Prime Minister's Atmanirbhar vision," Ambani says.