Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJio), the telecom arm of billionaire Mukesh Ambani-controlled Reliance Industries (RIL), has unveiled a a handset that is “made in India by young Indians for all Indians”, the Jio phone.

The Jio phone is provided with an “effective price of Rs zero”, compared with an entry-level smartphone that costs between Rs 3,500-4,000. However, the company will collect a one-time refundable amount of Rs 1,500.

“Starting August 15 this year, I am declaring digital freedom for all feature phone users,” Ambani said, addressing RIL’s 40th AGM here today.

“First, the voice will always remain free on Jio phone,” Ambani said, adding, that the handset comes with access to unlimited data with a monthly tariff of Rs 153.

“…that is one-thirtieth, 3 per cent of the existing price,” he said.

Jio customers

“Today, Jio is going to reinvent the conventional feature phone. Let me introduce India ka intelligent phone. Today Jio has over 125 million customers. We have proved all our sceptics wrong,” Ambani said.

Now, Jio customers alone are consuming over 120 crore GB of data a month, including 165 crore hours high-speed video every month. It took 25 years for our competitors to build 2G network. Jio has created a larger 4G network in just 3 years, he added.

Data consumption

In just 6 months of Jio's launch, data consumption in India went from 20 crore GB to 120 crore GB per month. Jio users consistently make more than 250 crore minutes of voice and video calls every single day, he said.

In less than 170 days, more than 100 million customers have signed up for Jio's services. On an average, RJio has added 7 customers per second every single day, and RJio has broken one world record after another, he added.

“We enabled Jio users to make unlimited voice calls from anywhere to everywhere in India, absolutely free. This was the fastest adoption of any technology service, anywhere in the world, faster than Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype,” he added.

rajesh.kurup@thehindu.co.in

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