Five reasons why Vodafone and Idea can’t beat Reliance Jio

Jio, the digital telecommunications arm of Reliance Industries, has launched commercially as the LTE-supported SIM cards is available to select people. Interestingly incumbents – Vodafone and Idea – kept telling that 4G is not a threat to their business and that Jio can’t change India’s telecom sector.

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However, they have pushed their 4G rollout to a commercial level. These two incumbents did not buy any spectrum in 2010’s auction for BWA (Broadband Wireless Access) auction, and they are now banking upon their liberalized 1800MHz spectrum for LTE-FDD rollout.

Let me point out why Vodafone and Idea will be left behind by Jio.

1. Jio has the strongest fiber backbone

Jio has tied up with several companies to share their fiber for transmitting the 4G tariff off the towers. Jio itself has been rolling out its own fiber optic backbone which is estimated to be more than 1,00,000 kilo meters across India. Jio also has access to Reliance Communications’ fiber network, which was Mukesh Ambani’s brainwork, and it has the largest private OFC network. Apart from intra circle OFC network, Jio is part of two international submarine cable network – Bay of Bengal and AAE-I.

At the same time, Vodafone and Idea are depending on their microwave-based backhaul as they have negligible amount of fiber network under the ground. However, Vodafone knows this limitation and is in talks with YOU Telecom, which has fiber network in 12 circles. Idea Cellular is yet to concentrate on this part, but to beat Jio on 4G turf, they’ll have to look into this issue quite seriously.