Reliance Industries unleashes a full-scale war in the mobile business by blurring the divide between voice and data. But its entry as a harbinger of radical change is sullied by grave questions of regulatory negligence that has stifled competition.
MUKESH AMBANI, chairman, Reliance Industries Ltd, with wife Nita and son Akash arriving for the company's annual general meeting in Mumbai on September 1, where he announced his audacious foray into mobile phone services.
Mukesh Ambani, The Chairman, managing director and largest shareholder of the biggest Indian conglomerate, Reliance Industries Ltd, set the cat among the pigeons on September 1 when he announced an audacious foray into mobile phone services. In an address to company shareholders, but which was carried far beyond by live feeds on 'IV channels, Ambani announced that the company's subsidiary Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd would launch its much-delayed mobile services from September 5.
Ambani's speech can be broadly parsed into three sets. First was the general homilies about how Jio would transform Digital India. The second set of issues pertained to how Jio would enable popular access to data, the new currency of enlightenment and empowerment as he described. The third was his promise to obliterate the distinction between data and voice on his network, what in technical terms has been described as IT convergence and has accelerated over the last decade.
Ambani waxed eloquent on how Jio planned to transform India by enabling cheaper access to data. Data, he said, were the "digital oxygen" and he said Jio's service would enable India to move from a situation of data shortage to one of data abundance. While commentators have dissected Jio's data plans and shown them to be not very different from that of its competitors (see story on page 16), Ambani's killer punch to competition was the virtual elimination of the distinction between voice and data traffic on the Jio network.
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