Jio GigaFibre Broadband Service, JioPhone 2 Unveiled At Reliance Annual General Meeting

After shaking mobile telephony with free voice calls and cheap data, richest Indian Mukesh Ambani today at Reliance Annual General Meeting unveiled an ultra high-speed fixed line fibre broadband Jio GigaFibre. 

At the Reliance Annual General Meeting, Mukesh Ambani unveiled JioGigaFibre Broadband service and their new feature phone JioPhone 2. Jio GigaFibre is an ultra high-speed fixed line fibre broadband service for homes and enterprises across 1,100 cities and announced plans for an e-commerce platform that may rival likes of Amazon.

The new offerings alongside the strengthening of the mainstay energy and petrochemicals business will help double size of oil-to-telecom conglomerate Reliance Industries to USD 125 billion by 2025, he told the company's shareholders.

Ambani said customers can start registering for the fixed line broadband from August 15 but did not give a launch date of the service, which will through one fibre provide high-speed internet, ultra high definition entertainment on large screen TVs, multi-party video conferencing, voice-activated virtual assistance, virtual reality gaming and digital shopping as well as smart home solutions.

Jio GigaFiber will offer ultimate broadband experience to surf, stream, game, and work, because of its ultra-fast upload and download speeds and effective functioning in milliseconds.

It will come directly to homes unlike in most cases where the fibre reaches only until the building and the last few meters of end connectivity is done using the traditional cable, which drastically reduces the speed and user experience due to patches and inferior cable qualities of such patch up.

Jio, Reliance's telecom service firm, will move India to top five nations in fixed-line broadband in the coming year, Ambani said but did not give pricing of the new offering or its launch date.

"We are currently running beta trials in tens of thousands of homes," he said. "While India has pole-vaulted into global leadership in the mobile broadband space... we still lag behind significantly in fixed-line broadband. India is ranked quite low at 134th in the global ranking for fixed broadband. Poor fixed-line infrastructure has been a key reason for this," he said.

With over Rs 2,50,000 crore already invested in digital infrastructure for providing mobile and broadband connectivity across the country, fibre broadband connectivity will now reach homes.

 In last one year, Jio customer base has doubled to 215 million, and 25 million JioPhone sold, he said, adding that the target is to achieve 100 million JioPhone users in shortest span of time.

JioPhone 2

At the Annual General Meeting, JioPhone 2 was also unveiled by Isha Ambani, Akash Ambani and technological head Kiran Thomas. JioPhone2 will be available from August 15 at an introductory price of Rs.2, 999. The new handset will be powered by KaiOS and will feature WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube.

Ambani also announced a Jio Monsoon Hungama offer which will enable the users to exchange their existing feature phones with the brand new JioPhone at just additional price of Rs. 501

The Dual SIM handset features 2.4 QVGA horizontal screen display along with QWERTY style keypad and loud mono speaker. It has 512 MB RAM and 4 GB internal storage which is expandable up to 128 GB via SD card slot.

JioPhone 2 is packed with 2000mAh battery life and supports connectivity options like FM BT BLE, LTE Cat4 DL, Wi-Fi, GPS and NFC. The handset sports 2 megapixels back camera with VGA front camera.

Source: Twitter

With inputs from PTI