MUMBAI: Speaking to shareholders at Reliance Industries Ltd's (RIL) 46th annual general meeting (AGM) chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani announced that the company's subsidiary Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (Reliance Jio) will launch the Jio AirFiber on Ganesh Chaturthi which falls on September 19 this year.

The last-mile wireless connectivity for high-speed internet Jio AirFiber was introduced during RIL's last year's AGM. As a plug-and-play easy-to-install fixed wireless access (FWA), it will deliver fibre-like speed over the air without any wires and will most definitely give tough competition to players like Bharti Airtel, that announced the launch of Airtel Xstream AirFiber FWA earlier this month. 

Ambani also said that with year-on-year revenue growth of over 20%, Jio’s overall customer base has crossed the milestone of 450 million subscribers and announced that the nationwide Jio 5G rollout will be completed by the end of this year. 

Ambani said, "We began our 5G rollout last October. In just nine months, Jio 5G is already present in over 96% of the census towns of our country. And we’re on track to cover the entire country by December this year. This makes Jio 5G the fastest-ever 5G rollout of this scale anywhere in the world."

Ambani said that despite COVID-19 disruptions, Jio’s optical fibre infrastructure spans over 1.5 million km across India and Jio Fiber has crossed 10 million subscribers, each of whom consumes, on an average, over 280 GB of data per month which was over 10 times higher than our per-capita mobile data consumption. 

According to Ambani, millions of potential customers were left without home broadband due to complexities and delays involved in extending optical fibre to their premises and Jio AirFiber will fill this gap. 

He said, "Through optical fibre, we can currently connect around 15,000 premises daily. But with Jio AirFiber, we can supercharge this expansion with up to 150,000 connections per day which is a 10-fold increase, expanding our addressable market over the next three years to over 200 million high-paying homes and premises."

According to Ambani, with the average user now consuming over 25 GB every month, Jio users consumed a monthly data traffic of 1100 crore GB, representing a 45% year-on-year growth. 

Ambani said that as of date nearly 85% of the total 5G cells operational in India were in Jio’s network. "At our current pace, we are adding one 5G cell to our network every 10 seconds, and we will have nearly one million 5G cells operational in our network by December," he said.

RIL's consolidated revenues for FY23 stood at Rs 9,74,864 crore, with a net profit of Rs 73,670 crore, in the same period, Reliance Jio achieved an all-time high revenue of Rs 1,19,791 crore and an EBITDA of Rs 50,286 crore. Reliance Retail posted an annual revenue of Rs 2,60,364 crore in FY23, with an EBITDA of Rs  17,928 crore and a net profit of Rs 9,181 crore.