Jio Fiber is set to be commercially available for people across India from September 5, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman, Reliance Industries Ltd at it's 42nd Annual General Meeting (AGM) announced.
The day also marks the third anniversary of Jio which now boasts of over 340 million subscriber base making it the numero uno telecom operator in India.
Jio Fiber is the FTTH (Fiber-to-the-home) service for home broadband users in India. The service has been in beta testing since over a year now in 0.5 million homes and in the interim has generated around 15 million registrations from across 1,600 towns of India.
Jio plans to reach over 20 million residences and 15 million businesses around India as it plans to roll out to the wider audience in the next 12 months.
Let’s take a look at the different services offered by Jio Fiber.
Jio Fiber Home Broadband price and features
With Jio Fiber, users will get access to internet connectivity with speeds upto 1Gbps. The base plan will offer 100Mbps speeds and starts at Rs 700 per month. It goes all the way up to Rs 10,000 each month.
As part of the Jio Fiber Welcome Offer, everyone who subscribes to any of Jio Forever Annual Plans will get an Full HD television or Home PC along with Jio 4K set-top box.
Jio Fiber will come bundled with subscriptions to major leading OTT platforms. At the moment, it wasn’t revealed who those players are and we don’t know whether Netflix, Prime Video or Hotstar are among those platforms. However, we could spot Eros Now, Voot and ALTBalaji apps during the presentation.
Reliance will also offer a Premium membership of Jio Fiber to customers which comes with a bunch of additional services like First-Day-First-Show Movies.
Anyone with a subscription of Jio Fiber Premium service will be able to watch movies on their TV at their time of release in theaters. This service is scheduled to start from sometime in mid-2020.
Jio is offering a landline phone with the broadband connection with unlimited calling facility. The company reiterated its promise of providing voice calls from JioFiber landline free for everyone.
Also, Jio announced international US and Canada tariffs for its customers with unlimited calling at Rs 500 per month.
The Jio Fiber connection comes with the Jio 4K set-top box and gives access to ultra HD content. It will also allow users to initiate multi-party video conferencing via Jio Call for free.
Jio’s 4K set-top box supports broadcast input from local cable operators in different regions. Reliance had acquired stakes in three major cable operators-- DEN, Hathway and GTPL to that effect. The combination of the three operators will allow Jio access to over 30,000 local cable operators across India.
Reliance will offer these operators upgraded infrastructure to help them one-up DTH operators. At least, that’s the aim for Jio.
Jio’s set-top box also offers “console-like” gaming and the company has partnered with Microsoft Game Studios, Riot Games, Tencent Games, Gameloft, Milestone and more for its catalog of games which it calls Jio Games.
The device is compatible with all major console controllers and enables 4K gaming with little to no latency.
We can expect titles like Halo, Age of Empires, Forza, League of Legends, PUBG Mobile, Arena of Valor, Asphalt, Modern Combat to be available from the catalog. However, we are not sure at the moment whether Jio Games will be an add-on to the base subscription or will be offered with every tariff plan.
Jio also revealed its Mixed Reality headset, the Jio Holoboard during the presentation, which works synonymously with the set-top box. It is created by Tesseract which is a company working in the immersive technology space in India.
There is no release date for the Jio Holoboard as of now but it aims to offer immersive shopping, education and theater-like entertainment experiences powered by its apps.
For power users, Reliance has announced Jio PostPaid Plus service which is touted to be a platinum grade service and product experience. This includes priority migration to Jio from the comfort of your home, family plans with data sharing, better tariff rates on international roaming and phone upgrades.
