Reliance Industries (RIL) Chairman Mukesh said that Jio will start services with 70% coverage of India, and it will offer speeds that are 40-80 times faster than the current Internet speed from day one.
The telco would target to expand the high-speed internet coverage in the country to over 90% by 2017, according to Ambani. Speaking here at the inaugural session of Ficci Frames 2016, Ambani said that his group has invested Rs 1.5 lakh crore in Reliance Jio, and termed the telecom venture as the biggest-ever for any digital startup globally. He however didn’t share the exact commercial launch date of the much-awaited service.
Ambani said the opportunity to transform lives of 1.3 billion people motivated him to re-enter telecom sector and he believes Jio will drive the country's ranking in mobile Internet access to among top 10 from 150 currently.
"I have no doubt with the launch of Jio our ranking will go up from 150 to among the top 10 in the next few years."
The company was planning to commercially launch high-speed 4G network with focus on data services by last December, but later delayed the official launch. According to him, Jio's network is engineered to provide a capacity of 10 GB per month for every user, against the current data consumption in India of about 0.15GB per month.
Reliance Jio is widely expected to soft launch its 4G services in metro cities starting April 1, 2016. It will offers service bundled with LYF smartphones, various reports suggest.