Jio completes 5G coverage plans for top 1,000 cities in country

Jio has completed 5G network coverage planning for top 1,000 cities in the country and is augmenting its fibre capacity as well as running pilot across sites, a senior company official said during a presentation.

The company has created teams to focus on dedicated solutions for 5G deployment in India, Reliance Jio Infocomm President Kiran Thomas said on Friday evening.

"5G coverage planning has been completed for 1,000 top cities across the country. Jio has been doing trials on advanced use cases across healthcare and industrial automation on its 5G network," Jio said in a statement.

Thomas during the presentation said that the company is running a 5G pilot in multiple cities and network planning for the roll out of 5G using 3D maps and ray tracing technology is going on.

"We are using the most modern approaches towards network planning, especially 3D maps and ray tracing technology because 5G is pretty unique technology, which requires very advanced network planning techniques, and we are undertaking that for all of India, so that as and when the approvals are received for us to roll out this network, we will be well geared-up to prioritise our rollout, where we can make the maximum contribution," Thomas said.

Auction for 5G spectrum is expected to be held in the first quarter of the next financial year.

Reliance Jio reported to close the third quarter which ended December 31 with net addition of 1.02 crore customers year-on-year (YoY) at 42.1 crore.

The subscriber base, however, declined on a quarter-on-quarter basis.

"We closed the quarter at 421 million subscribers. That was a reduction of 8.4 million, but the gross addition continued to be very strong 34.6 million. And the reduction was really on account of SIM consolidation and some of the less active customers, now with tariff increases, etc, looking at consolidating uses in a single SIM," Reliance Jio head of strategy Anshuman Thakur said.

On a reported number basis, Jio's ARPU remained almost flat but the company's average revenue per user (ARPU) increased by 8.4 per cent to Rs 151.6 on a year-on-year after making adjustments interconnection usage charges (IUC) which it had to pay to other operators.

The IUC charges have become nil from January 1, 2021.

Jio Platforms posted an 8.8 per cent increase in net profit at Rs 3,795 crore for the third quarter ended December 2021.

It had posted a net profit of Rs 3,486 crore in the same period a year ago.

Gross revenue from operations increased by 5.76 per cent to Rs 24,176 crore from Rs 22,858 crore in the October-December 2020 period.

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (RJIL), the telecom services arm of Jio Platforms, posted a 9.8 per cent rise in net profit at Rs 3,615 crore for the quarter, compared to Rs 3,291 crore in the year-ago period.

RJIL's revenue from operations increased 4.62 per cent to Rs 19,347 crore from Rs 18,492 crore earlier.