Reliance Jio Infocomm will offer voice services in the Indian telecom market, giving competition to established rivals such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Communications, etc.
PTI on Saturday reported that the voice-dominated domestic telecom space is set to liven up further with corporate giant Reliance Industries, the only national licence holder for 4G spectrum, saying it will be offering not just high speed data but voice services as well.
“We will definitely be offering voice … the fact that we have submitted the application for participating in the forthcoming 2G and 3G spectrum auctions makes it clear that we are going to enter the voice space,” said Reliance Group Chief Financial Officer Alok Agarwal.
However, Agarwal, who was briefing the media on RIL’s Q3 earnings, however, declined to reveal anything more such as Capex plans, tariff, launch time-line.
This is for the first time the company, which before the Group’ division was one of the pioneers in cheaper call rates when it had launched CMDA telephony under Relaince India Mobile brand, has expressed its intention to enter the voice space.
Interestingly, Reliance Jio Infocomm has infrastructure sharing agreements with its rivals such as Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications.
For instance, RJIL announced agreements with Reliance Communications for inter-city optic fibre sharing, for sharing of up to 45,000 of RCOM’s nationwide telecom towers, and for joint working arrangements to configure the scope of additional towers to be built at new locations.
Earlier this week, Reliance Jio applied for participation in the spectrum auctions for the 900/1800 Mhz bands, slated for early February. The government has put 16 blocks of 900 Mhz spectrum for auction each in Delhi and Mumbai and 14 blocks in Kolkata.
In fact, RJIL has already been granted Unified License for all 22 Service Areas across India by the Department of Telecom (DoT) to become the first telecom operator in the country to get pan India Unified License. The Unified License would allow RJIL to offer all telecom services including voice telephony under a single license.
In addition, RJIL was allotted MSC, MCC & MNC codes for Mobile Access Services across all 22 circles by the DoT providing it with about 22 million mobile phone numbers across India to provide mobile access services.
The entry into 2G space indicates Reliance Jio Infocomm’s eagerness to offer voice services along with data.
In addition, Reliance Jio Infocomm is already testing VoLTE, of the compelling services for Indians to pick up data services from Reliance.
Reliance Jio 4G
Earlier this month, Reliance Jio said it would offer 10-12 times faster 4G wireless service compared to 3G networks.
“We are practically achieving a speed of 49 megabit per second downlink (download) and uplink is between 8-9 mbps. Theoretically, the present set up that we have, can achieve speed of 112 mbps downlink,” an RJIL official had said.
Reliance Jio is the only Indian company to have nationwide 4G spectrum acquired for over Rs 12,000 crore in the 2010 spectrum auctions.
The company is running trial of products, including phone and TV services that it plans to provide through 4G network. It will provide outdoor customer premise equipment (CPE) that will connect to its mobile towers.
