Reliance Jio becomes world’s fastest-growing 5G FWA provider; targets 1 mn user additions a month

Jio Platforms

Reliance Jio is the fastest-growing 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) provider globally. Its JioAir Fiber offering in India tripled subscriber growth in the second quarter of the fiscal year, a senior official said.

“We continue to make good progress on the home side. We are the fastest-growing Fixed Wireless Access provider globally with our JioAir Fiber offering. We reached 2.8 million subscribers... that’s almost doubling our subscriber base with Air Fiber this quarter, and the run rate has ramped significantly,” Jio Platforms’ Senior Vice President Anshuman Thakur said in the post-earning presentation on October 14.

Kiran Thomas, president at Jio Platforms, said during the Q2 briefing call that the telco’s next target is to add almost a million homes every month with the help of its 5G-based JioAir Fiber and wired JioFiber broadband services.

“5G is powering our home broadband service and has accelerated our acquisition rate for homes. We were 0.6 million every quarter…but in the September quarter, we tripled the growth in terms of homes mainly using JioAirFiber,” Thomas said. “We see that there’s still much more optimization and scale-up that we can do. The next target that we have is to add nearly 1 million homes every given month. So that is a pace at which we are able to grow our home broadband service thanks to JioAirFiber,” he added.

During the call, Thakur said Jio observed SIM consolidation in the second quarter, albeit with lesser intensity than when tariffs were raised, and expected it to taper down.

“We continue to build market leadership with 5G service, with 148 subscribers switching to 5G, contributing 24% of the wireless data tariff. We are happy with the service uptake and the nature of the delivery. We expect to keep improving on this…we expect data traffic to keep increasing,” Thakur said.

Jio’s ARPU rose 7.4 percent to Rs 195.1 from a year earlier due to the tariff hike and a better subscriber mix. Jio said the full impact of the tariff hike will be felt in the next 2-3 quarters.

“ARPU is steadily growing… there is the impact of tariff increase, but in addition, customer upgrading and subscribers moving to higher plans as consumption improves and some of the additional services that we have been able to sell to customers also contribute to the increase in the APRU,” Thakur said. “Some SIM consolidation and delay in recharges we saw in the quarter…there was a 10.9 million reduction in the subscriber base, but that was more than compensated by the strong increase in APRU.”

Reliance Jio Infocomm, India’s largest telecom operator by users, reported a quarterly profit of Rs 5,445 crore, up 12 percent from Rs 4,863 crore in the same quarter a year ago.

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