Reliance Aims for 2 Crore Jio Fiber Subscribers, 5 Crore Den and Hathway Users

Reliance Industries (RIL) is aiming to take Jio Fiber to more than 2 crore households, the company said in a corporate presentation filed with Bombay Stock Exchange. The company also said that it is targeting 99 percent population coverage with the fibre-broadband service. The presentation was filed by the company on Friday where it gave a glimpse of its vision for the future. It also mentioned that it is planning to target 5 crore-plus households for its cable networks DEN and Hathway.

Jio Fiber was first announced in 2018 as Jio GigaFiber and was said to offer default 1Gbps broadband Internet speeds to the users. However, in August 2019, it became apparent that the name of the service would be Jio Fiber with a base speed of 100Mbps but with costlier plans with 1Gbps of speed as well. The target of 2 crore plus households for Jio Fiber is quite ambitious as the company's broadband service had just 8.4 lakh subscribers at the end of January.

If looking at customers receiving Gigabits speeds, the aim looks even farther. In fact, even the total number of wired broadband (>512Kbps download speed) customers in India has not crossed the 2 crore mark yet. While the company had entered into the 4G mobile Internet space with an aggressive pricing model, the same can't be held correct for its wired broadband service. Therefore, it looks like the company will have to make a lot of efforts to achieve its goal.

RIL also said in the presentation that it is planning to aim for more than 5 crore cable target households for its cable companies DEN and Hathway. Reliance acquired a 66 percent stake in Den Networks and a 51.3 percent stake in Hathway Cable and Datacom last year.