Reliance Jio, India’s telecom market leader, may launch its fixed wireless access (FWA) device offering – Jio AirFiber – for the consumer market in the festive quarter at an up to 20% discount from the current options in the market, industry executives and analysts said.
This will be the first mainline effort by Jio to monetise 5G after the data top pack it introduced early this year.
“We should hear the announcement during the upcoming AGM (annual general meeting). Traditionally, Jio has launched new products with big bang offers and this may be no different,” said a person in the know.
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Jio did not respond to queries sent on the matter by ET at press time.
The telco is said to have started consumer trials across cities where its 5G rollout has completed and stabilised. It has also sent out devices to selected users, including employees, for testing in the home environment in preparation for the launch, those in the know added.
Jio’s FWA device will use carrier aggregation technology which creates a “data pathway” using different 5G airwaves – in this case 700 MHz, 3300 MHz, and 26GHz – acquired by telco in last year’s auction.
Earlier this month, rival Bharti Airtel launched its FWA offering – Xstream AirFiber – in two cities – Mumbai and Delhi and priced the device at Rs 2500. The subscription is priced at Rs 799 a month. Airtel is currently offering subscriptions only in blocks of six month, taking the initial investment by consumers to just shy of Rs 7300.
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“Given there is already a device in the market by a competitor (Airtel), Jio may look at a competitively priced offering either through discounted devices, or by offering free trial for a period of time. It will basically look to attack the six-month commitment that the current offering comes with,” an analyst with a leading brokerage said.
Earlier this month, Jio launched its FWA device for enterprise connectivity using the 26 GHz frequency band it acquired in the July 2022 5G spectrum auction.
But the telco has been talking about its FWA offering for retail consumers for almost a year now, having first mentioned it at parent Reliance Industries Limited’s (RIL) AGM last August. After that, it has demonstrated the device at industry events, and the management has been signalling its impending launch during earnings calls.
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In the most recent earnings call, RIL president Kiran Thomas said that the FWA offering is expected to significantly add to the telco’s home broadband business and help ramp up the number of connected premises to 100 million.
Globally, there were 100 million FWA connections in 2022, according to Swedish telecom infrastructure provider Ericsson. This number is projected to increase to 300 million by the end of 2028, with 80% of the connections using 5G technologies.
Multiple reports put India as a key market to drive FWA adoption given its high data consumption, and vast geography.
