Reliance Jio Infocomm

Reliance Jio’s Contrarian Approach to Airtel – Adopts Asset Heavy Model

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Contrary to the current trend, Reliance Jio prefers an asset-heavy model. The basic premise is that assets created at a large scale and competitive capital cost provides a long-term competitive advantage through business cycles. Cost-leadership is the core mantra of Reliance Group – this is achieved via capacity creation at a massive scale. For the telecom sector, spectrum and technology are viewed as the two factors of production – the former is scarce and finite whereas technology costs tend to decrease exponentially. So Jio would tradeoff in favour of cheaper spectrum with nascent ecosystem compared to a technology with good current ecosystem.

At launch we estimate Jio to have

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What is the Business Case for Reliance Jio to bundle Cable TV ?

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Jio Cable TV BroadbandThe aim of Reliance Jio is to provide not just broadband but other value-added services like cable TV via this highspeed, high-capacity channel. Leverages the massive infrastructure built for the telecom business. Jio has already laid out 250,000 kms of optical fibre across the country to provide high-speed broadband access. However, broadband can only use a small fraction of this capacity. Bandwidth-heavy multi-stream multimedia content is the best way to utilize the available capacity of this resource, which is a sunk cost.

Today the ARPUs for high-speed wired broadband being

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Reliance Jio Enters Beta Testing – Jio Money Launched

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Jio-MoneyReliance Jio Infocomm mentioned that network rollout has been substantially completed across India. It has employed a large number of testers across the country. The beta program is to be ramped up in the next few weeks. Jio will be a pure 4G-LTE player with day-1 capacity to support 200mn subscribers; 85% coverage likely vs mandatory 80%.

Jio has demonstrated pan-India Lawful Intercept and Monitoring (LIM) facilities for LTE data and voice video & messaging, plus ILD services, to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). It has completed the acceptance testing of its network in all circles with

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Can Reliance Jio 4G-LTE Pricing be Irrational to Disrupt Market ?

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Billions of dollars of capital already employed with another few perhaps waiting in the wings to be deployed in the upcoming mega battle for market share—is there even an argument that Reliance Jio Infocomm would not destroy any sense of sanity and value-creation possibility in the Indian telecom industry ?

We believe there is more than an argument, if one were to (rationally) assume that R-Jio intends to have a business case at some point with that ‘some point’ being within a reasonable timeframe. One needs to appreciate that wireless business cases in India to be viewed as a series of 20-year projects given the naked reality of large spectrum renewal. Our expectation of ‘P&L rationality’ from R-Jio ironically flows from the very fact that it has deployed billions of dollars in the business. Large balance sheets need large P&Ls to support a business case and large P&Ls need a certain (large) market size

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Why LTE – Voice Fallback Crucial for Reliance Jio ?

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Few countries offer both TD and FDD simultaneously – US and Sweden are the two markets. LTE ecosystem is well developed across multiple bands ranging from 800/900/1800/1900/2100/2500/2600MHz. In fact, 2300MHz doesn’t appear to be a very popular band amongst the sample set of 18 countries.

LTE was launched on an average seven years after 3G launch and when data contribution to revenue averaged ~27%. Assuming Reliance Jio’s launch by end of CY15, the data contribution in India would be ~20%. While it may seem slightly early, we believe the key is the development of the right

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Reliance Jio Testing Enters 2nd Phase, Massive Beta Launch Soon

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Reliance Jio 4G to Impact 3G in IndiaReliance Jio Infocomm is conducting pre-launch testing of the telecom network. A beta program is to be initiated in a few weeks to test the network and upgrade it for commercial launch of operations. Jio has demonstrated pan-India Lawful Intercept and Monitoring (LIM) facilities for LTE Services to the DoT. It has also participated in the acceptance testing of its network with DoT for intra-and inter-circle MNP. Jio has completed interconnect with all operators across circles. Jio says it has faced no issues in the interconnect of VoLTE calls with 2G/3G networks.

Jio services will include voice, high-speed

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How Reliance Jio Plans to Attack Airtel, Vodafone,Idea ?

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Reliance jio Attack Airtel Vodafone IdeaData clearly suggests that top 30% customers account for ~70% of revenues in the India Wireless Industry. In this backdrop we plan to analyze new entrant Reliance Jio Infocomm’s positioning and onslaught on Airtel, Vodafone and Idea to gain high end Wireless Customers as well as snatch away Data customers from Reliance Communications’ NetConnect and Tata DoCoMo Photon Mobile Broadband Consumers.

4G LTE Handset The SmartPhone handset changing cycle is less than 24 months for high end customers. Customer should shift handset (to LTE) is

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How Reliance Jio Built the 2nd Largest Telecom Network ?

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Reliance Jio NetworkReliance Jio Infocomm’s installation of ~70,000 LTE sites for the launch network is mostly completed. With the recently-acquired spectrum, the company has a decent mix of 1800/800 MHz spectrum for voice coverage (with 2300MHz for data capacity). In addition to 2300MHz and 1800MHz, RJio acquired 800MHz spectrum in nine circles in the Mar-15 auctions, most of which can be used for LTE (CA). Thus, including RJio’s last year’s bidding, RJio now has either 1800MHz or 800MHz spectrum in 20 circles, which account for 92% of industry revenues

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Reliance Jio Delivered Unmatched LTE Backed Wi-Fi Experience at IPL Mumbai

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Reliance Jio 4G Speeds UnbeatableReliance Jio Infocomm launched Jio Chat App (messaging /file sharing, audio & video calling app) last month and has already crossed 500,000 downloads. During IPL matches in Mumbai, the company offered free Wi-Fi facility backed by 4G LTE network for over 30,000 spectators at the Wankhede Stadium.

A reader of our Blog has sent in this review along with a screenshot of the Speedtest Result using OOKLA App he performed at the Wankhede Stadium using Reliance Jio Mobile Broadband. The results were quite impressive, clocking speeds of 51Mbps download and 36Mbps upload. It took just half a minute to download a 60 MB video, which typically takes ~4 minutes on

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Reliance Jio Lights Up 60,000+ Towers, Testing Small Cell Networks

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Reliance JIo Employyes Network TestWe got some updates on Reliance Jio Infocomm’s network from some of the Service Providers(SP) who are currently serving the upcoming telco. Of the ~65,000 sites of RJio that are currently installed, it appears 28,000-30,000 are RJio’s own towers (mix of poles and full ground based towers). If true, this is a much larger share of own towers in RJio’s network than what we had earlier anticipated.

Further, one of the SPs we spoke to that has a contract from Reliance Jio in few of the circles indicated that many of these sites are up and running (i.e. company is spending on fuel/power on a daily basis) as network testing is aggressively being carried out. The SP is gearing up for the launch of commercial voice+data services (23000MHz + 1800MHz) by Reliance Jio in a handful of cities in June / July.

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