Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm will be giving an update on the performance of India’s largest data services provider at 1:30 PM today.
You can watch the live broadcast of Mukesh Ambani’s speech below.
https://youtu.be/2XGyUGM1rXY
He is widely expected to announce that his company has crossed the 100 mln subscriber mark. He may also announce details of new tariff plans that will come into effect from April 1, when the free, promotional plan period gets over.
Ambani had revealed a set of tariff plans in September last year, which were at the time the cheapest in the country.
However, since then, rivals like BSNL, Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular have either matched those tariffs, especially for data, or unveiled even cheaper plans.
Jio, which started signing up customers in September, had crossed the 72 mln mark in December and has been adding about 20 mln per month. At the rate, therefore, the 100 mln subscriber mark would have been hit by around the middle of this month.
There were also various media reports that the RIL chairman did indeed make such an announcement at the recently held Nasscom Leadership Forum in Mumbai.
However, the news reports were followed by a clarification that the billionaire made no such announcement.
The milestone would come as a surprise to many people, including those in the industry, as very few people expected that any operator would be able to cross 100 mln 4G subscribers in 2017, let alone at the beginning of the year.
For comparison, Idea Cellular, the third biggest 4G service provider in India, has only around 20 mln 4G devices on its network and many of these subscribers have not activated 4G packs.
Similarly, three months ago, Bharti Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal predicted that the new operator would be able to sign on about 40 mln users by the end of December, but additions would start “dropping off” after that.