With the increasing craze for higher FUP broadband plans and unlimited FUP plans, Reliance Jio, which is still testing its broadband service, JioFiber, has now started offering 100 Mbps broadband connection with 1.1TB FUP limit. Reliance Jio, which is expected to officially announce the JioFiber broadband services in Q2 2018 has now taken the competition seriously. So far, Jio offered a 100 Mbps connection with 100GB FUP. However, 100GB FUP has now become a thing of past and users are craving for more data FUP on a monthly basis, which is the reason behind the increase of FUP to 1.1TB. However, Jio will not provide 1.1TB of FUP up front as per a report. The Mukesh Ambani-led company will still offer 100GB of FUP during the Welcome offer period, however, at the same time, it will introduce free data add-on packs which the customer has to activate manually.
A report from The Hindu states that Jio will still offer Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband plan of 100 Mbps with 100GB FUP. Once the customer exceeds the 100GB FUP, they will be allowed to activate data top-up of 40GB for 25 times in a month, which makes the overall data benefit to 1.1TB. So when the connection gets activated, Jio will provide only 100GB data. As it was rumoured, Jio will unveil both home broadband and enterprise broadband plans, and the Internet Service Provider is looking to grab 100 million home broadband users across 30 cities in India post the launch. And that's a very small number because the telco will be providing FTTH services free for a period of three months or even more than that. When the service goes official, JioFiber will be available across 30 major cities in India.
As we already know, Jio is already running a Preview Offer of JioFiber in major cities such as Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Ahmedabad, Jamnagar, Surat, Vadodara, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru etc. Once the service goes commercial, Jio will launch a Welcome Offer, as we reported earlier, same as how it did with the Jio 4G services. The company offered free 4G services to the users before the commercial launch in September 2016, and once the service goes official, the Preview Offer becomes Welcome Offer.
At the moment, Reliance Jio is collecting a refundable security deposit amount of Rs 4,500 from each household to provide a free JioFiber connection. The company is also providing a free Jio Router to the customers opting the service, which can also be used for IPTV services that Jio is planning to launch. Through the JioFiber Home Gateway, the telco is looking to provide connectivity to multiple devices. And there might be an 'extend' option provided to the customers, under which it will be offering Wi-Fi coverage in every corner of the house with an additional modem.
To be noted, Reliance Jio currently has over 3 lakh kms of optical fibre network spread across the country. The JioFiber broadband services could go official anytime soon or by the end of Q2 2018 or in early Q3 2018.
