India’s welathiest person, Mukesh Ambani, said his telecom venture Jio, which has catapulted India as the world’s largest mobile broadband data consuming nation in less than two years, was first thought of by his daughter, Isha, in 2011.
Ambani made the statement in his acceptance speech at an awards function in London on Thursday night.
Since the idea first cropped up, Reliance Industries, which owns and operates the world’s largest single location refinery complex at Jamnagar in Gujarat, has spent more than $31 billion to break into India’s mobile-phone market. The 2016 upstart, called Jio, dislodged rivals and has emerged as the nation’s No. 4 carrier by offering call services free for life and data transmission at rates cheaper than most other players in the market.
Reliance Jio is also gearing up for newer data-heavy services that can connect homes, businesses, and cars to the internet.
With abundant youthful talent, Ambani said India is poised to become the third largest economy in the world by 2028 -- within just a single decade.
“The idea of Jio was first seeded by my daughter, Isha, in 2011. She was a student at Yale, and was home for holidays. She wanted to submit some coursework, and she said, ‘Dad, the internet in our house sucks’,” he recalled.
“Isha and Akash belong to India’s young generation that is far more creative, far more ambitious and far more impatient to become the best in the world. These young Indians convinced me that broadband internet is the defining technology of our age and India cannot be left behind,” he said in his acceptance speech for the ‘Drivers of Change’ award at the Financial Times ArcelorMittal Boldness in Business Awards in London.
Ambani said while the United States pioneered 1G mobile network, Europe ushered in 2G, and China leapfrogged with 3G, Jio has created the largest greenfield 4G LTE-only data network in the world.
First Published: Mar 16, 2018 14:02 IST
ShiBen0725 on October 20th, 2018 at 08:50 UTC »
So, umm this is the reason t-series is so popular now. (related but not exactly)
tanmay-jain on October 20th, 2018 at 08:00 UTC »
With jio, he brought down the internet and calling charges. We now get unlimited calls and 1GB 4G data per day for 3 months at just around 7$. Earlier similar package in India would've cost around 70$ (by other telecoms).
Edit: Since the comment got so much traction, let me add a bit more detail.
In early days of Jio we had same package for free for 6 MONTHS!! Also there are a few apps which come with the package, for example, JIO TV: If you have Jio, you can watch TV on mobile with no extra charges. There are like 5-6 apps which one uses on a daily basis, available with the Jio package.
shash747 on October 20th, 2018 at 07:40 UTC »
This is the same guy that bought out an entire TV network for $600+ million when one of its channels refused to stop negative coverage of him.
He also decided to sit out of the 4G spectrum auction and simply bought out the company with the most spectrum, to start Jio.
The spectrum was for data usage only. Then he decided to put competitors out of business by offering rates 98% lower than them (~$2.5/month for 42 gigs of data + unlimited calls and text). All competitors ran into losses, with the 2nd and 3rd largest players having to merge in order to stay alive.
Ambani doesn't fuck around.