Reliance Jio targets Rs 20,000 crore opportunity for NB-IoT offering

Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio Infocomm is targeting a Rs 20,000 crore revenue opportunity with its new Narrowband IoT offering, part of the Mumbai-based telecom company’s connectivity solutions suite.

"Jio has developed an innovative service on its pan-India 4G network called Narrowband Internet-of-Things or NBIoT. Using NBIoT, data from billions of smart sensors, whether residential, industrial or public, can be collected from across India with the highest reliability and lowest cost," Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, which owns Jio, said. Ambani was speaking to shareholders at Reliance’s annual general meeting.

He cited the instance of electricity meters and said that over 300 million of them need to be connected digitally for real-time monitoring and to give consumers full visibility and control of cost and quality.

"Within another two years, it is estimated that there will be more than two billion connected IoT devices in our country. Jio aims to connect at least one billion of these on its IoT platform. This translates into a Rs 20,000 crore per year revenue opportunity for Jio," he said, adding that the IoT platform will be commercially available in January next year.

Interestingly, Jio rivals Airtel and Vodafone have been working on their own set of IoT solutions based on Narrowband which is a new mode of communication between devices or machines ensuring better connectivity at better power or battery management on devices.

Ambani also said that other than IoT, the company was focusing on broadband services under the name of Jio Gigafiber to earn more revenue. Home broadband, enterprise broadband and broadband for small and medium enterprises were the current focus areas, he added. The company also plans to provide fixed-line connectivity and cloud applications to small and medium businesses.

"This will make them productive from day one and empower them to succeed in the market even against much larger enterprises. I believe that in their success lies the recipe for sustainable growth and large-scale employment for the Indian economy," he said.

For large enterprises, the company will provide cloud solutions to accelerate digital transformation.

On the home broadband side, Jio received 15 million registrations from 1,600 towns and the company has drawn up plans to reach 20 million residences and 15 million businesses in these towns.

"Over the past year, we have built significant momentum in our Jio Fiber rollout and we are confident that we will complete our network rollout within the next 12 months. During the last year we also installed Jio Fiber – on a trial basis – in nearly half a million homes to fine-tune our services based on actual customer feedback. And we have found that these trial homes on average are consuming more than 100 GBs per month and this usage is increasing with each passing day," he said.

As part of the home offering, Ambani said that customers will get fast broadband speeds up to 1GBPs, a landline connection, a digital set-top box, UHD entertainment content, VR content, voice-enabled assistants, video-conferencing , gaming and home security solutions.

Jio has invested nearly Rs 3.5 lakh crore towards creating the digital infrastructure in the country. "Recently we have divested about Rs 1.17 lakh crore of hard infrastructure into separate infrastructure investment trusts or InvITs to better monetize and unlock value from these assets," he said.