Why did Jio take 6 years coming?

The Reliance Corporate Park in Navi Mumbai has been the busiest of official complexes in the area in the last few years. The lights were rarely turned off at night, clearly indicating the round-the-clock nature of work being done to launch the world’s largest 4G network.

While Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular launched 4G much earlier, despite receiving the spectrum at the same time in 2010, Reliance Jio took six years to roll out the service.

In the case of RJio, technology proved the biggest challenge. The company’s spectrum for 4G LTE (long-term evolution) services is in the bands of 2300 MHz, 1800 MHz and 850 MHz (through the spectrum sharing partnership with Reliance Communications).

“This mix is unique globally and, as a result, harmonisation of active infrastructure and devices is a difficult and time-consuming task. Even the cell radius, indoor coverage, capacity limitations and signal attenuation of each of these spectrum bands are different,” pointed out Jayanth Kolla, founder and partner at tech research firm Convergence Catalyst.

Moreover, the LTE technology adopted by Jio for offering high-speed data services is itself a new one. It was first adopted in North America in September 2010, around which time Jio started testing it. “Like with most other new technologies, this one too took time to mature and develop an ecosystem around it,” said a company official.

RJio also had to wait to get 4G-enabled handsets, which first surfaced in India only around mid-2015. Since most handset vendors were offering only a handful of 4G devices back then, Jio needed lower-priced devices to seed the market. “And that took some time as well,” said the official.

But more importantly, to have a data network for such a huge capacity, the challenge was to have the fibre laid out across the country.

“Laying out fibre isn’t easy because permissions take a very long time,” said the RJio official. The fibre right of way (RoW) permissions are currently regulated by multiple local agencies. The costs also differ from area to area, making fibre-laying extremely expensive as well as time-consuming.

In the case of telecom towers too, the situation is somewhat similar, as each unit requires permission from up to 40 authorities. RJio’s network is running on 92,000 telecom towers, of which around one-third are owned by the company. It has forged partnerships with Aircel and RCom for sharing their infrastructure.

Convergence’s Kolla said that over the past six years, in the project phase, Reliance Jio has invested significantly in building its network, garnering the entire available spectrum and laying the optic fibre network across the country.

“What other operators took 20 years to build (a pan-India network), was done in six years by us,” the official said.

Jio might be a late entrant on the Indian telecom scene, but it is definitely the one to watch out for.

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