Jio Claims Its UBR-Based Technology Is Better Than Fiber Due to Multiple Advantages

JioHotstar Platform

“Media, clearly is one of the best integrations when you think about what this Jio Star one is and with becoming the second largest OTT platform globally and it is impressive to see how big this has essentially become and with 460 million MAUs and the fact that during IPL we had about 287 million paid and even after IPL the fall is hardly meaningful. So therefore, this is getting good traction,” Srikanth added, while referring to the group’s content platform.

“Digital services, the 5G network, the standalone that we talked about, that is a huge market when you look at it from homes, when you look at enterprises is just I think the beginning, especially because today the type of services which are required by an enterprise are very high. I think you will see a very strong traction when it comes to enterprises.”

“…More importantly, this consumption will only grow as we talk about the broader demographics, the younger population, disposable income, and so on,” Srikanth concluded.

Also Read: Jio 5G FWA Stack Sees Global Interest After India Scale-Up; Jio Private 5G Powering Industry 5.0

Deep Tech Identity with Full In-House Stack

Taking over the presentation, Head of Strategy, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, Anshuman Thakur said, Jio was born as a deep tech company. While the results are important to see how the connectivity business and the telecom business are doing, we should not lose sight of the fact that it is really a deep tech company that we have built here. It is one of the leading deep tech companies in India, with an enormous amount of innovation and technology development that we have done over the years.

Own Technology Stack

We have created unparalleled tech infrastructure in the country, most of it with our own technology stack. “The largest greenfield deployment of LTE that we did in 2016 before we launched, or the VoLTE deployment — this was the world’s largest VoLTE deployment. Even today, our assessment says that Jio carries more VoLTE traffic than all other operators globally put together. And this has worked at scale with our completely own tech stack.”

“We did the world’s fastest 5G deployment last year or the year before last, once again with our own tech stack, with our own core software, hardware, and a whole bunch of infra management.”

“The OSS, BSS that we deployed is completely now in-house, and it is ready to be deployed in other places. We are the first to deploy UBR for UBR-based connectivity at scale. This is a technology that operators worldwide have tried to work on and have not had much success. We have now demonstrated this on the ground with several million homes connected that this works. And we can make it work in an efficient manner.”

6G Technology Patents

“We hold the highest number of patents on 6G technology already. So that is something that we are doing a fair bit of work already. Most of these are telecom related tech stacks that we have developed, but this is not the only area that, as you are aware and we have spoken about this in the past.”

Jio Cloud

“We have developed best-in-class platform services as well, be it enterprise and consumer cloud offerings. We are now one of the largest cloud players in the country for enterprises. And with our own Jio Cloud for consumers that we launched, and with over 35 million active users there. We are now a force to reckon with when it comes to consumer cloud services as well. And we have been able to provide quality of services, in fact, at par, I would say better than what is being offered today. And of course, we provide it free of cost.”

“We have cloud PC, gaming, media stack, a whole bunch of things that we have developed. And these are technologies that will take to support us in the next phase of growth of our company when we take these outside of India,” Thakur highlighted, saying, “We saw the first phase of Jiotisation in 2016, now we are seeing the Jio 5G effect and hence going forward we are going to see the technology effect of everything that we have built up.”

UBR (Unlicensed Band Radio) as a Global First

A key highlight was the scale-up of Jio’s Unlicensed Band Radio (UBR) technology, positioned as a cost-efficient and scalable alternative to last-mile fiber and traditional 5G fixed wireless access. The company has connected over 7.4 million homes via both UBR and 5G-based Air Fiber, claiming 82 percent global market share in fixed wireless access. With speeds up to 2.5 Gbps and customizable bandwidth configurations, UBR is expected to accelerate home broadband penetration towards the 100 million target.

“More than 20 million homes connected by the end of last quarter and this number is also growing fairly rapidly, 2.6 million net ads for the quarter last year. This was a milestone for the quarter. We crossed 200 million 5G subscribers. So once again, by the end of the quarter, we were at 210 million 5G users, 20 million additions during the quarter. And this number has also been growing,” Thakur emphasised.

“…Back to homes, Air Fiber — out of the 20 million plus that we connected by the end of the quarter, 7.4 million Air Fiber homes — makes us by far the largest company globally in Air Fiber. Part of this was using the 5G network that we had, but a substantial chunk also uses UBR. With 82 percent market share, we are the largest FWA service provider globally,” he added.

Speaking about UBR, Thakur said, “Today this technology — this tech stack, the entire value chain, the whole software and hardware stack — is only available with us and has been deployed at scale. This is something that all the global operators are looking at us for, to see how we have done this so successfully. And then there are a whole bunch of initiatives on AI, translating into sustained market leadership. We ended the quarter with over Rs 35,000 crore in revenues in JPL.”

“Now this is a network of half a billion users with over 200 million 5G consumers, which is running on a stack completely developed in-house. This is the kind of technology, this is the kind of network that globally companies are looking for. This is a big opportunity for us.”

Network Slicing and 5G SA

“On our network, we have omni cloud support. We can do the deployments on-premise, public or private cloud. We have the ability to slice our network, so dedicated network slicing, advanced secure 5G core, which again is unique, fairly unique. This is on our network. We have been able to deploy this with quantum-safe encryption. And then the whole 5G in a box for enterprises and private 5G deployments. This is standalone 5G deployment that we have done.”

“People doing mission-critical work may need much more prioritised services, which is something that we are able to offer, and we offer today. Our home broadband requires a different kind of bandwidth than some of the other use cases that you see here. We have dynamic slicing, so the route selection, the way it works is fairly dynamic, and we can do this on a real-time basis, based on where the traffic is coming from, based on user requirements.”

“Today, we are not offering or differentiating customers based on pricing. We are not trying to do that, but for specific use cases, we will come up with plans that people can use and really get differentiated services,” he added.

UBR Technology for FWA

“As I said, 7.4 million on fixed wireless, many of which are using the UBR technology now. And end-to-end control on the full value chain. And this is an important point. The whole deployment is being done by our own tech stack, our own, in fact, now most of the hardware is being manufactured by us only and manufactured locally in India. So, this gives us enormous ability to scale up our business,” Thakur reiterated, highlighting that the scale is picking up.

“And we have the ability to keep scaling it because once again, the network is fully scalable. The tech stack is completely owned by us, can be scaled up. And the hardware is also being produced by us.”

“We have been prioritizing this UBR, a global first offering, at scale. This is not something new a lot of operators have tried doing this a lot of companies have tried working on this and people have been a little bit successful, but nobody has really been able to scale this now given the quantum of demand in this country when we are talking about almost 300 million homes, more than that, 330 odd million homes, which at some point in time will require high quality broadband services at their homes or at their premises, the SMBs, fiber, last mile fiber is difficult. And you all know this, we all know this. Where possible, we would still do it, but otherwise it is costly, it is time-consuming. And this is a constraint that people have felt world over,” Thakur said.

He explained, “The solution that they have gone with to the market has been the 5G-based fixed wireless access, which has its own limitations, coverage and cost constraints because you are using the same network, you are putting much more pressure on the same network, you cannot really do too much of modification in the way you offer the home services. There is going to be constrained capacity and scalability because the network is limited.”

“Imagine in the Indian context with the amount of spectrum that we get, that we have, and we have a fair bit, still how much can you really scale up just using 5G?” Thakur questioned.

“Some of the specific comparison points, if you look at spectrum limited availability for 5G, because those are the bands that the government auctions and there is limited availability whereas with UBR, on the unlicensed band radio, there is much more spectrum available, which the government also provides to encourage Wi-Fi services and home broadband services,” he explained.

“Because of the nature of the 5G network and because of the nature of the mobility use cases, normally the uplink, downlink would be asymmetrical in the 5G fixed wireless but here you can configure the network in the way that consumers want. So, it can be completely one is to one. It can be 70-30 based on what the consumers really want. And it can be fairly dynamic again.”

“So, if I have use cases at home where I am watching content all the time, I possibly need a lot more download. But there may be use cases — there may be users — who may need a lot more upload. And we can dynamically configure the network for each specific customer. The throughput varies with load. In the case of 5G, the more the number of users, the more constraints there will be on how much capacity you can give — contention will come in. Whereas here, in the case of UBR, you can dedicate bandwidth to a customer. Can we stay well?”

He said, “We are today offering 1 Gbps-plus plans for our UBR-based customers, which is at par with fiber. And we are already now delivering up to 2.5 Gbps throughput on the field. So as good, in fact, better than fiber. Fiber can get cut sometimes even on Jio network, it does get cut sometimes. Very, very rarely, but it does get cut sometimes but spectrum does not get cut. So that is the other big advantage. 5G network would not support very high-end multicast kind of use cases, whereas that can be done with UBR. Scalability is much higher. So, lots of advantages.”

Thakur said operators globally have tried this, and maybe they have not prioritised this so much because the amount of the demand has not been as high for them to feel pressure on their 5G networks. “In India, clearly, that pressure is there. Even with our kind of capacity that we have created, it would not be the most efficient use of our network to use it up completely for home broadband services.”

“And therefore, UBR is a clear differentiator. We already have operators from all over the world coming and looking at the net service that we are providing. They are finding it quite interesting. So, we have our own tech ownership for this. Completely in-house, our own teams at Jio Labs and some of our portfolio companies have developed this, the point-to-multipoint solution for UBR. Performance is now proven at millions of homes and premises. The deployment can be fairly modular based on wherever we need it. There is a little bit of a graph, you can see this later, but on how easy the deployment is, where you are installing an A6 with any gNodeB, which already we have, that equipment can go anywhere. It can go anywhere where there is a fiber backhaul. You do not even need the full tower, but for representation purposes, that is what you do. And you install the C6 receiving equipment on top of the customer building and then you connect with fiber, or you can even connect wirelessly to the homes and the premises inside.”

UBR Deployment

Speaking about the deployment, Thakur said, “Deployment is fairly straightforward, therefore, very little need of any civil work for the deployment. And there is, of course, a significant cost advantage. So, this has been a great differentiator. And this is helping us really ramp up the pace of our home deployment. The targets of 100 million seem much more doable and in near time, based on the use of this technology.”

On the consumer side, Jio’s media and digital platforms business continues to gain traction. The Jio-Star merged entity has emerged as the world’s second-largest OTT platform with 460 million monthly active users, including 287 million paying IPL viewers.

Cloud-based gaming service Jio Games has crossed three million registered users, while Jio AI Cloud — offering upto 100 GB free storage — has over 33 million users.

Jio Games

“We launched a few consumer services. Now that our 5G has well matured, it is fairly ubiquitous. Customers are using a lot of the 5G services. So we are now gradually bringing in things that LTE network would have found it difficult to support but given 5G on the mobile device and our home broadband, we are able to launch some of these services now, like Jio Games, which is really a cloud-based gaming platform. And the gamers can get access to all of the high-end games without having to invest, spend money on a console or on high-end devices at home. You are just playing off the cloud. The throughput and the low latency of the network is supporting that,” Thakur said.

“We already have over 3 million registered users for this service. And this, again, we are seeing very good uptake fairly rapidly. We have tied up with some of the global gaming companies, the IP owners. We have over 500 titles with data, voice, and SMS. So, we provide all of this in packs to our customers. And we are seeing a good uptake on this service.”

Jio AI Cloud

“The other service that we have spoken a quarter ago, or maybe a few months ago, was Jio AI Cloud, which is where we are giving cloud access to all of the users. So, we are basically democratizing AI and cloud storage. We are giving up to 100GB of cloud space free to every consumer. We are helping them use this better. They are no longer facing constraints at 15GB or even lesser in some cases, where they are running out of cloud space and they are having to pay for that service. And along with the cloud offering, of course, it is not just the storage, but we are giving them a whole bunch of solutions alongside that. So, starting with the frictionless sign-in, but then photos, digilocker, events. So, a whole bunch of things. This service is as good as any cloud service that a consumer can get, and this is completely free of cost. And it is now being used by over 33 million registered users. It is scaling up quite well. We think we can push this a lot more. This gets us customer loyalty. This gets us customer stickiness.”

“And of course, this then enables us to offer many more AI-related services, AI-based services to customers who are using this and the feedback from consumers has been very good for our AI cloud-based services. And we plan to keep scaling this up.”

Also Read: JioPC Turns Your TV Into an AI-Ready Computer at Rs 599 Per Month

Jio PC

The newly launched Jio Cloud PC enables any screen to function as a computer, targeting students and small businesses with pay-as-you-go models.

“Jio PC, something that you would have seen in the last few weeks, a fairly straightforward opportunity. India does not have enough computers. Students are not able to get enough good compute where they are. You can now, with our services, with our connectivity, with the bandwidth that we are offering, you can convert any screen into a computer, with all of the processing happening on the cloud. Fairly straightforward solution, but maybe markets outside India have not needed this, because of affordability in India, clearly something that students, the small enterprises, SMBs, they all needed this as a service. And now we are offering this commercially very cost-effective. We are giving them flexible pay-as-you-go models,” Thakur explained.

“Cloud native, everything is happening on the cloud. So, you can be much more mobile. You can access these services from any premise. It is really great for students. It is really great for small enterprises, where they are able to access all of these things from wherever they are. We have built in the apps, so when you log into the computer and you can try it at your homes if you have the Jio setup box, you log into the computer, you see the full screen and you see with the apps you can use any of that. Mostly people do not have the keyboards, so you will have to just invest in a keyboard to make the usage easier. Using the computer on a remote is difficult. And then it is fully secure. So those are some of the services and products that we have been scaling up,” he said, speaking about the ease of using the Cloud PC service.

Enterprise Growth Across BFSI

Enterprise services also recorded steady momentum, with Jio expanding market share in BFSI, industrial, and automotive sectors.

“On the enterprise side, we saw some good momentum during the quarter with large enterprises,” he said. “We have you know effective account management. So, we have been able to increase our wallet share with a lot of large enterprises where in several cases now we are the only service provider. And this is across fairly large companies and especially in the BFSI and the industrial segments.”

“We’re tapping into new age businesses, like bundled connectivity, security, and Wi-Fi stack. This is an interesting area. While it is a specific example given here on quick commerce, dark stores, but a lot of similar use cases where high-speed connectivity and security is needed is where our services are being preferred by a lot of enterprises. We are also seeing strong momentum in the IoT portfolio. This is, again, in the BFSI segment, we are seeing a lot of traction here,” he added.

Anshuman Thakur said, “We have grown our subscriber base to 498.1 million during the quarter. Net customer addition of 9.9 million. The ARPU grew to almost Rs 209. The very healthy increase in the total data consumption, which has now gone up to 55 billion GBs during the quarter, 18 exabyte, 37 GB per user per month. So, you see a significant increase, a strong 24 percent year-on-year increase in data traffic. And this is just continuing to build.”

Internet or Cached Data: The Internet or Just Cached Data: What Are Users Actually Using?

“This was the IPL season, so yes, people were consuming a lot of data for watching IPL but we are now with all those other use cases around gaming and computer and home PC, whole bunch of use cases coming in, which is growing the data consumption on the network,” he said.