While the cellular 4G VoLTE Jio party has gone past the 100 million subscriber mark under six months and has unveiled monthly paid plans under the Jio Prime Membership scheme, Reliance Jio is now aggressively expanding its fiber-to-the-home Gigabit broadband service.
Even as Mukesh Ambani took to the stage and delivered a seismic shock to India’s communication landscape with its Jio 4G launch in September last year, one of the slides during his hour-long presentation also touched upon Jio Giga Fiber broadband deployments later in the future. The promise of that future is now upon us.
As early as January signs of Reliance Jio making inroads in the country’s broadband market with a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network dubbed as Giga Fiber broadband started offering free services until March 31, with a 100 Mbps data speed in select residential areas of Chennai, Pune and Mumbai regions.
According to an ET report, there are only about 18 million home broadband connections in India, which is an abysmally low number compared to the nation’s cellular Internet penetration, and it’s only natural that both the top telcos in this space, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio, are trying to expand their footprint -- but not without stiff competition from local rivals such as Hathway, Spectranet, Tikona and Nextra Teleservices, all around the country.
Reliance Jio’s offering residents free 1Gbps connection at 100Mbps speed and 100GB monthly FUP or download limit. Test customers aren’t offered any official data plans at the moment.
With that in mind, Reliance Jio seems to be in aggressive expansion mode, right now, conducting pilot and beta testing programs by actually wiring up homes, apartment complexes and housing societies in Mumbai, New Mumbai, Pune and Chennai. Currently, Reliance Jio’s offering residents free 1Gbps connection at 100Mbps speed and 100GB monthly FUP or download limit.
According to India Today, one of the residential buildings where Reliance Giga Fiber is being tested out of is the home of Rushabh Vora, in Walkeshwar, Mumbai, who’s reporting Jio Gigabit Fiber speeds as following -- 94.99 Mbps download, 79.99 Mbps upload, and 6 milliseconds ping as tested through Speedtest.net while pinging a local Mumbai server.
Digit is reporting one of their team members based out of Tardeo, Mumbai, who’s piloting the Jio Giga Fiber home broadband connection at 100Mbps speed and monthly FUP of 100GB for the next three months. As reported by Digit, the Jio agents who visited their colleague’s home didn’t give him a list of the company plans to choose from. Seemingly they charged him Rs. 4000, as a security deposit for the Jio Gigabit router, on a refundable basis should he choose to opt out of the service at the end of the free three month trial period.