Reliance Jio Infocomm could overtake Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications in revenue over the next four to five years and corner 11% of the total wireless market, an analyst with a prominent global financial group has predicted. 
By the 2017-18, Reliance Jio and Reliance Communications would have very similar mobile voice revenue market share, at about 8%, while elder brother Mukesh Ambani’s firm would have a 20% share of the mobile data market compared to RCom’s 13%. At present, RCom has a share of 16% in data revenue and about 10.3% in the mobile voice.
Bharti Airtel, which has a market share of 30% in non-voice revenue at present, will see its share reduce to 25%, the analyst predicted in a report. Vodafone will move from 21% to 20%, while Idea Cellular’s wireless non-voice revenue will go from about 14% at present to 16.9%.
Idea and Reliance Jio will be the only players to raise their overall market share in the wireless market from the present to 2017-18, the India unit of the foreign brokerage predicted.
On Reliance Jio’s plans, the report said: “Our channel checks suggest that RIL has started deploying Global Base Monopole towers at least in the National Capital Region (NCR) region. We note that earlier (in June 2013) the company had placed an order for Li-ion telecom batteries for 10,000 Global Base Monopole (GBM) sites across the country to France-based Saft Groupe,” it said.
“Our discussions with various operators suggested the company would opt for Circuit Switched Fall Back technology to manage the transition from LTE data networks and fall back to 2G/3G network and terminate calls in non-RJIL networks. However, there would be a visible (as much as 5-10 seconds) time lag as customers switch from voice to data and vice versa,” it said.
It did not say whether the GSM or 3G network used for the fall back would be Jio’s own, or that of another operator.