After having reached a 5G subscriber base of nearly 150 million, Reliance Jio is now looking at gaming as a potential use case to monetise these services. The telecom operator is expected to launch booster mobile plans for gamers who want high 5G speeds and congestion free networks.
So far fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband solution has emerged as the only monetisation use case for 5G for the telecom operators.
“Having reached a certain user base, we will now look at monetising certain use caes. For example, for games, rather than putting users on congested network slice, we can put them on superfast (network) lane, which is a booster lane,” a senior company official said.
According to the official, the same will improve gaming experience as the response time during playing games will be faster.
Experts said the move could attract professional gamers to buy those paid subscriptions from Jio. However, the challenge would be from fibre broadband or FWA, as mostly gamers rely on these, which offer a stable connection and ample bandwidth and speed to users.
As of September end, Jio connected 2.8 million homes on Air Fibre.
Among other use cases, Jio is pitching for a quantum secured network calling solution for enterprises. The solution will help the teams, working on critical projects, to operate in a secured network which no one will be able to hack, the company official said.
“We have provided solutions for the Indian Army, wherein network security is essential. Creating secured layers is possible with 5G,” the official cited above said, adding that a booster line for 5G will not lead to net neutrality issues.
Net neutrality means open, equal Internet for everyone, regardless of device, application or platform used and content consumed.
“We are not creating any differentiation among the content, it is a paid service. Any game can be played on the faster network slice. Net neutrality won’t come into picture,” the official said.
Even as Jio is exploring 5G monetisation use case across enterprises and consumers, the company in the tariff hike undertaken in July, also raised the threshold for users to use unlimited 5G data. Against the earlier plan of Rs 239 or above, unlimited 5G will now be available on all 2GB/day and above plans starting Rs 349.
In the enterprise segment, the company is currently running 5G trials in medical science such as for remote surgery, use of robots in warehousing, oil rigs, among others.
“5G gives three things – very high capacity downloads, very low latency and security. Any enterprise, which is ready to give money for this, Jio will provide 5G solutions to them,” the official said, adding that private 5G has no use case as the cost of replacing current automation to 5G, for example, in automobile factories, is higher.
Jio has deployed over 85% of the 5G radio cells operating in India. On further expansion of 5G and capex, the official said the company has ample capacity at the moment and we are pushing users to use unlimited data for Air Fibre and mobility.
The company is betting big on its AI cloud as a framework. It is embedding AI into all its processes and offerings, creating end-to-end workflows with real-time, data-driven insights and automation.
On the enterprises side, the AI infrastructure will be provided by Jio Brain, which initially will be a tool to accelerate AI adoption across group companies, and then will be opened to other enterprises.
Company officials said its plan is to create the lowest AI inferencing cost in the country, which will make AI applications more affordable than anywhere else, apart from making AI accessible to all.
