We disrupted mobile, now onto broadband – Reliance Jio President

Reliance Jio has sent shockwaves through the Indian telco space, but it isn’t finished just yet; next stop, broadband and enterprise services.

Many companies will claim to be disruptive, but few can point to concrete evidence of organised chaos like Jio can. Speaking at this year’s Big Communications Event in Austin, Mathew Oommen, President of Reliance Jio Infocomm, reeled off some very impressive numbers and the ambition is yet to be dampened.

“The last 2-3 years India has gone through disruption in almost every sector,” said Oommen. “The impact these transformations have had on more than a billion people is almost unimaginable”

As it stands, the company has more than 186 million subscribers, while its network supported 372 billion minutes of VOLTE calls over the first quarter and 2.4 billion hours of video each month. Not bad for a market which was not considered capable of supporting 4G. Jio is still causing chaos in the mobile space, Oommen stated the objective is to get to 500 million subscribers, but ambitions are being widened to broadband and enterprise as well now.

Oommen claims there are only 18 million broadband connected homes in the country right now, while the enterprise market is currently at a fifth of what it could be. This is the next target for a business which does not seem to accept boundaries and limitations which are placed on the telco market.

“We disrupted the mobile industry and now we are looking further,” said Oommen.

Of course this should not be taken as an indication the team is going to ease up on mobile. The team built a video-centric network over the last couple of years which is going to fuel the next stage of growth in the mobile space. Edge computing is right at the forefront of technological developments here as the team drives towards continued evolution and establishment in the media space.

At the centre of this evolution is the MyJio app. This app not only serves as the focal point of customer interaction, but acts as a content aggregator platform for Jio. This is another area where Jio is defying industry trends, as while other telcos are struggling to make an impact in the media world, MyJio and its features is screaming ahead. The app already has 150 million downloads, while the JioTV service has 100 million subscribers and JioChat has 50 million. Other services include JioBank, JioHealthHub and JioMusic, making it a pretty well populated platform.

The attitude put forward by Oommen is a simple one; disrupt or be disrupted. Jio demonstrated this by offering free voice calls with its tariffs, decimating the business models of its competitors in the process, and the continued evolution into the content and media services space is another demonstration of the destructive nature of the Jio business.

“India and Jio are just getting started,” Oommen proclaimed as a closing statement. We believe him.