Telecom major Reliance Jio’s fully-owned subsidiary Reliance Projects will buy Rs 123.84 crore worth of optical fibre cables from HFCL Limited. In a regulatory filing, HFCL said: “The Company along with its material subsidiary, HTL Limited, has received the Purchase Orders aggregating to ~Rs 123.84 crores from Reliance Projects & Property Management Services Limited for supply of Optical Fiber Cables to one of the leading Private Telecom Operators of the country.” The time period by which the order is to be executed is October 2023, according to the filing.
Earlier last year, Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani had said that Jio’s pan-India fibre-optic network is more than 11 lakh kilometres in length which is long enough to go around Earth over 27 times. While addressing the RIL annual general meeting, he had said, “Let me now talk about Jio’s fixed-line network. Its high-quality, redundant and always-available fibre-optic network is the information backbone that carries data traffic from every corner of India, and connects it to the global Internet. Today, Jio’s pan-India fibre-optic network is more than 11 lakh kilometres in length – enough to go around planet Earth more than 27 times.”
The RIL chairman also added that JioFiber is now the top FTTX service provider in the country. As of January 2023, Reliance Jio has cornered 50 per cent of the market share in terms of the overall broadband. In its fiscal third quarter presentation, the company maintained that JioFiber continues to lead the industry in terms of net subscriber additions. Earlier in October 2022, on the sidelines of India Mobile Congress, HFCL Managing Director Mahendra Nahata had told FE, “I believe our revenue should increase at a rate of 15-20 per cent every year and the major contribution will come from optic fibre cable and telecom equipment.”