Mukesh Ambani’s target to add broadband customers under the Reliance Jio’s fiber network seems to have faced a slow take off, the TRAI statistics for September 2019 shows.

Jio does not feature in the top five wired broadband service providers as of September, 2019, the TRAI data indicates. Jio started offering broadband services on commercial basis on 5 September.

The top five wired broadband service providers are BSNL with 8.69 million, Bharti Airtel with 2.41 million, Atria Convergence Technologies with 1.48 million, Hathway Cable with 0.86 million and You Broadband with 0.75 million customers.

Reliance Jio on September 5 announced the commercial launch of its JioFiber broadband service — offering six monthly data plans. These data plans are priced between Rs 699 and Rs 8,499.

Reliance Jio’s base plan offers 100Mbps data speed and 100GB monthly data whereas the most premium plan offers 1Gbps data speed with 5,000GB monthly data.

TRAI said the number of broadband subscribers reached 625.42 million in September 2019 from 615.43 million at the end of August 2019.

Meanwhile, the top five wireless broadband service providers are Reliance Jio Infocom with 355.22 million, Bharti Airtel with 125.42 million, Vodafone Idea with 112. 17 million, BSNL with 12.82 million and MTNL with 0.21 million broadband customers.

Rival broadband operators cannot match Reliance Jio’s coverage of 1,600 cities. Most of the other private broadband operators focus on the top urban areas. Airtel, which is Jio’s main rival, offers fibre broadband in about 90 cities.

BSNL’s network primarily runs on copper wires, which has a lesser capacity compared to optical fibre cables, according to media reports.

Jio said it is giving away its 4K set-top box worth Rs 6,400 and Jio Home Gateway worth Rs 5,000 bundled with all tariff plans. It has bundled 3-month subscriptions of OTT platforms with each connection though it is not clear which applications will be made available.

The latest statistics indicate that Reliance Jio did not make much difference to customer needs.

Baburajan K