Jio finally reveals 5G user numbers

Reliance Jio revealed its 5G customer base passed 50 million and an aim to deploy nearly 1 million base stations by December as it claimed to have 85 per cent of the total operational next-generation sites in India.

Speaking at parent company Reliance Industries’ AGM, chair and CEO Mukesh Ambani (pictured) said it is adding a 5G site every 10 seconds.

Ambani said Jio’s 5G service reaches more than 96 per cent of the towns across India and is on track to cover the entire country by December.

This is the first time Jio released 5G user figures.

Ambani claimed Jio has the capacity to “smoothly transition” its entire 4G customer base to 5G, with minimal additional capex.

“With the growing adoption of Jio 5G, we are also seeing an increasing trend of high-ARPU, post-paid customers choosing Jio.”

He noted the network runs an in-house “5G stack”, with its own portfolio of radios spanning small cells to large tower-based units.

Earlier this month, Jio stated it had met the minimum rollout obligations for the network.

It revealed fibre home broadband users now stand at 10 million, with average monthly data usage of 280GB.

Ambani said this is ten-times higher than its mobile data consumption. Its optical fibre infrastructure covers more than 1.5 million km.

In June, rival Bharti Airtel revealed it had more than 10 million 5G customers.