By Prarthana Mitra
Streaming ultra high definition videos on your smart television will no longer be a buffer-some experience. Reliance Jio has announced its plans to foray into the broadband sector with a new fixed line service JioGigaFiber – ready for a mid-August launch.
Here’s what happened
Reliance Industries (RIL) chairman Mukesh Ambani broke the news at an annual corporate meeting on Thursday, laying out the plan to extend fibre connection to 1100 cities. Ambani also hopes that the project would herald a much-needed revolution in the country’s data consumption habits.
With Netflix, Amazon and Hotstar already entering Indian households, the time is ripe to make homes smarter and enable viewers to watch all their favourite content at a speed of gigabytes per second. JioGigaFiber not only promises to give users immediate access to 600 plus TV channels, thousands of movies and millions of songs, but will also have a feature to place a voice call from one device (TV, laptop or mobile phone) to another (also connected via JioGigaFiber).
Broadband with benefits
Another excellent feature is granting students, scholars and enthusiasts access to a large repository of lectures from universities around the world. Window shopping and gaming will also be a transformative experience with VR headsets to transport you to an automated world.
This high-speed connection can finally help realise the concept of smart homes in its truest essence by pairing all your electronic devices to your mobile phone, thus enabling you to control temperature, light, motion detection, opening and closing of doors, among other things.
Reliance took the telecommunications sector by storm in 2016 with Jio, which has accrued 25 million phone customers in India within a span of 2 years. With JioGigaFiber slated to roll out on August 15, RIL now hopes to disrupt the largely decentralised and disorganised broadband sector this time around.
Prarthana Mitra is a staff writer at Qrius