Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani on Wednesday said that his ambitious telecom venture, Jio, was going to be the world’s biggest startup with an investment of Rs 150,000 crore.
Speaking at a Ficci Frames 2016 event in Mumbai he said that Jio will transform lives by making services affordable.
He said, “It (Jio) is one of the largest transformational green-field digital initiatives anywhere in the world with an investment of over Rs 150,000 crore.”
On the launch timeline, Economic Times reported that Ambani did not give any definitive timeline.
Reliance insiders told www.jantakareporter.com that ‘Chairman recent said that the soft launch will take place in April.’
A wider commercial launch is ecpected to take place by December.
Last December, Jio had rolled out services for its 120,000 employees and partners amidst huge fanfare with top Bollywood stars joining the twitter buzz over its launch.
“Jio will start services with 70% coverage of India. From day one. From day one, Jio mobile broadband will offer speeds that are about 40 to 80 times faster than the current average speeds,” Ambani added.
He said that Jio will make services affordable to the consumer. “All of this is of no use if we cannot make it accessible and affordable to consumeRs in all parts of the country.”
He said that against the current data consumption in India of about 0.15GB per month, Jio’s network was engineered to provide a capacity of 10 GB per month for every user.
Ambani said, “I have no doubt that with the launch of Jio, India’s rank will go up from 150 to among the top 10 of mobile Internet rankings in the world.”
The commercial launch of Jio is expected to offer affordable high-speed data services over fourth-generation or 4G network in the country.