Reliance Jio’s now aiming at 250M subscribers

When Reliance announced the commercial launch of Jio earlier this month, Mukesh Ambani’s team expected to have 100 million subscribers on board by the end of this year. But reports state that the enormously positive response to the Jio Welcome Offer has made the company revise its target to 250 million subscribers.

The company is reportedly ready to invest ‘another couple of billions’ to expand its network capacity and is in talks with potential partners as well, according to The Hindu.

Presently, Reliance has capacity to serve in excess of 100 million wireless broadband and 20 million Fibre-to-Home customers, according to its website. However, to accommodate more than double the number of subscribers it is currently targeting, the company needs to expand its network capacity fast, and is reportedly in talks with the likes of Samsung, Juniper Networks, Ericsson and Cisco among others, the publication reports.

Apparently, Jio has also tasked Samsung to setup 48,000 towers, which will add to the existing 1.3 lakh telecom towers. Jio's current customer base of over five million is choking network capacity of other operators due to high traffic and this (evolving scenario) has necessitated the expansion.
Besides, the company is planning to launch its fibre broadband offering speed of 100 Mbps, which will consume more data.

“The idea is to multi-fold our transmission capacity to 250 terabits per second (tbps) from 2 tbps now, as Jio is getting enormous response from data users who are using data at an average of 26 GB per month compared to the industry average of less than 1 GB per month,” the publication’s source was quoted as saying.

If Reliance Jio manages to reach the 250 million subscribers mark, it will become the second-biggest operator in the country behind Bharti Airtel. The telecom industry has a wireless subscriber base of a little more than 1 billion subscribers as of June, according to TRAI and Bharti Airtel leads the pack with about 260 million subscribers.

Also, read Register online to get Jio SIM card delivered at your doorstep.