India Mobile Congress kicked off in the nation’s capital New Delhi today. The theme for this year’s IMC is "New Digital Horizons - Connect, Create, Innovate", aimed to build upon forging industry relationships between key partners, and showcasing leading-edge technologies. The event will see tech majors like Samsung, Huawei, Qualcomm, Ericsson, Vodafone Idea, and Airtel talk about and showcase their future readiness for connectivity, IoT, 5G and other digital avenues in the country. The opening ceremony of the event saw a number of keynotes from leading industry and government figures, including Chairman of Reliance Industries and pioneer of Reliance Jio, Mukesh Ambani, who spoke about the current state and future of digital growth in India.
Kicking off his comments, Ambani said that India has moved from 155th rank in mobile broadband penetration to being the number 1 nation in mobile data consumption in the world in less than two years. This of course, was in reference to how Reliance Jio disrupted the mobile internet market in India, in the past two years of its existence, and turned the country into one of the world’s largest consumer of mobile internet in the world.
Speaking to audiences at IMC 2018, Ambani said that India has had the fastest transition from 2G/3G to 4G in the entire world and envisioned that By 2020, “India will be a fully-4G country and ready for 5G ahead of others.”
In its recent State of Mobile Networks: India report, OpenSignal clocked Jio’s 4G availability at a hugely impressive 96.4 percent. The platform also noted that India has seen massive growth in its mobile networks in the past few years and is now ranked among the top 20 countries that OpenSignal has measured for 4G availability.
On the back of this exponential growth, Ambani said, “In the past eight months alone as many as 50 million villagers have got affordable smartphones. For most of them… it is not only their pehla phone (first phone)…but also their pehla radio (first radio) and music player…pehla TV (first TV)…pehla camera (first camera)…and pehla Internet (first internet) in their lives”. “This combination of connectivity with affordability is unparalleled in the world,” he added.
Ambani also also spoke about the progress of JioGigaFiber and said that with the launch of the Fiber-to-the-home service, Jio has “begun an ambitious push in fixed broadband”.
“I believe India will rise from a lowly 135th rank to be amongst the top three nations in fixed broadband at a pace that will surprise the world,” he said.
Concluding his remarks, the RIL Chairman said, “India is now ready to not only embrace… but actually lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
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