Reliance Jio Infocomm today said it has added 72.4 million mobile subscribers to its 4G network in India till December 31, 2016.
The Mukesh Ambani-promoted 4G telecom operator is targeting to achieve 100 million subscribers by the end of the current fiscal.
Reliance Jio, which earlier said it invested $20 billion in telecom networks and spectrum, will make an additional investment of Rs 30,000 crore or $441 million to enhance its 4G network’s coverage and capacity in the country.
“The investment is aimed at meeting customer response to Jio’s services as well as to address the anticipated growth in demand for digital services. Jio will make these investments by financing via an equity offering, to strengthen its balance sheet for growth,” said RIL CMD Mukesh Ambani, who is also the richest Indian.
In December 2016, Reliance Jio said it crossed 50 million subscribers in 83 days. Jio started its free offer on 5 September 2016. Jio has extended its free services till March 31, 2017. Last week, Sunil Mittal, the promoter of Bharti Airtel, said the free offer from Jio is impacting the business of rival telecom operators.
Jio has ramped up the scale of its customer oriented initiatives such as eKYC platform with over 3 lakh outlets and home delivery services across 600 cities.
Jio, which has the widest and most extensive 4G network in India, will expand the network to cover over 90 percent of population shortly. Jio is the only operator in India to deploy pan-India LTE on a sub-GHz band, in addition to pan-India 1800MHz and 2300MHz spectrum band.
According to speed test results available on TRAI MySpeed portal, average download speed on the Jio network at 18.17 Mbps in December 2016 was twice that of rivals such as Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone India, etc.
Jio continues to face interconnection congestion issues with some of the large operators making inadequate provision of points of interconnection (POI) capacities even months after starting 4G services by Jio.
The POI capacity provided by these operators is still way below requirement and is falling short of the customer addition pace of Jio, resulting in quality of service issues for Indian customers. The resultant call failure rates continue to be of the order of 175 calls failing out of every 1,000 calls from Jio to Airtel network when the QoS regulations mandate that no more than 5 calls out of every 1,000 calls can fail.
