India’s Reliance Jio set to launch 4G in 800 cities

Indian operator Reliance Jio Infocomm has announced plans to launch 4G services in no fewer than 800 cities across the country between April-June 2015, according to a report in the Business Standard, as covered by Total Telecom. According to the source, the carrier intends to offer dongles and mobile Wi-Fi routers in the launch phase, giving users a more cost-effective way of accessing 4G than via an expensive smartphone. Reliance Jio was initially expected to launch 4G services in March 2014. The report quotes the company as saying: ‘We are currently in the process of conducting our service field trials across multiple towns and cities, as well as in-house. During this period, we are introducing our services to small groups of people who will offer us feedback, so that we can develop a robust service platform and then scale up our services.’ It is understood that Reliance Jio will offer real-world speeds of between 16Mbps-18Mbps, with peak burst speeds of up to 50Mbps. Further, the same report says that under phase two of its launch, the operator is also looking to offer fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) services at speeds of up to 100Mbps.