The launch of RJio’s 4G services seems to be much closer to reality now ever. The company hopes to differentiate on the basis of quality of services and content. While the incumbents have been working towards upgrading and modernizing their networks to face the RJio challenge, the same cannot be said about their content strategy.

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In anticipation of RJio’s 4G launch the incumbents have been modernizing and upgrading their networks. Bharti Airtel, India’s largest service provider has already announced plans to spend $9billion over the next two-three years to upgrade its network. Similarly, Vodafone has been investing on IPfication of its network as part of its Project Spring. Idea Cellular is also investing to modernize its network to meet the RJio challenge.

There is little doubt that networks and consequently the quality of networks is going to be important for incumbents to prevent their customers from moving away from their network. However, the other battle is going to be fought on the content front. It is imperative for the telcos to offer a portfolio of innovative content offerings to increase data consumption of their subscribers.

It is important for service providers that consumers use their platforms and content offerings so they are able to capture valuable subscriber data, which is going to be critical for them to retain their relevance in the 4G ecosystem. This subscriber data will enable them to offer contextual and targeted mobile and digital advertisement, which is only going to increase in relevance going forward. The recent acquisition of Yahoo by Verizon is a case a point. Increasingly the telcos would need to reinvent themselves. They would need to go beyond the networks.