RJio eyes incumbent telcos’ next bastion — enterprise services

After capturing the mobile data market, Reliance Jio Infocomm is looking to enter the next major bastion held by incumbent telecom operators — enterprise services.

RJio has reportedly had a soft launch of the services, with commercial rollout expected to follow. This will result in a head-on collision with the existing players, who have already blamed the new entrant for the sector’s mounting debt and losses.

“RJio is in the final phases of testing its enterprise offering, which is the definite logical step in its growth path. With most of the infrastructure, including optical fibre cables (OFC), towers and data centres, in place, it’s only a matter of time before the services go live,” a source close to the development told BusinessLine .

RJio, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries, conducted a soft launch of the services this week and demonstrated the services, said another source.

The company is looking to offer unified communications, Multiprotocol Label Switching (a protocol for high-speed telecom traffic) networks, Internet Protocol-Virtual Private Networks , cloud services and managed video-conferencing, among others.

RJio, which already has about 1 lakh telecom towers and more than 2 lakh route km of fibre, will use these infrastructure to service corporate clients, which are mainly customers with high average revenue per user (ARPU).

Further, the company will also utilise the recently acquired assets of Reliance Communications for its enterprise foray. Industry sources and certain channel partners also confirmed Rjio’s enterprise foray, while that of the soft launch could not be separately verified. An email sent to RJio went unanswered as of press time on Friday.

On December 28, 2017, Mukesh Ambani-led RJio had announced the acquisition of the wireless assets of debt-laden RCom, controlled by his younger sibling Anil.

RJio bought more than 43,000 towers, 1.78-lakh route km of OFC network, spectrum in 800, 900, 1,800 and 2,100 MHz bands, and 248 Media Convergence Nodes.

On Friday, RJio slashed tariffs by ₹50 for its 1 GB per day pack, and announced 50 per cent additional data on its 1.5 GB per day packs.

With the reduction, Jio’s unlimited monthly pack will now be priced at ₹149, the lowest tariff in the industry. The company is also providing 50 per cent more data benefits on its ₹198, ₹398, ₹448 and ₹498 packs.

COMMENT NOW