1.

How has the advent of Reliance Jio impacted the growth of Internet consumption in India and
what future scenario can be depicted.
Answer:
Helmed by Reliance Jio, India is home to the world's second largest internet user base,
accounting for 12 per cent of all internet users globally. The company is largely believed to have
driven 4G revolution in the country with dirt cheap data prices as compared to other carriers. “The
launch of Reliance Jio’s 4G telecom services in September 2016 helped spur the digital economy in
India as it propelled internet usage in the country, with fast, reliable, and cheap 4G services leading
to significant growth in data usage.

Reliance Industries has invested $32bn in Jio — an entrant to India’s mobile market that has
attracted more than 150m subscribers in less than 18 months. The company has
fundamentally transformed the Indian telecoms market, turbocharging mobile data
consumption with its cut-rate tariffs and triggering a wave of industry consolidation
involving powerful rivals, from Vodafone to Tata.

Jio launched its service in September 2016. It offered free data to users until the end of
December, with a data cap of 4 GB per day. The offer was then extended, courtesy the
'Happy new year' plan, with a reduced cap of 1 GB per day. As a result, Jio was successful in
forcing other network providers to come out with plans offering data at much cheaper
rates.

Jio announced its paid 'Prime' plans in March 2017. Even after that, the average cost per GB
of data has remained very low, at almost ₹11 per GB. This is against the average of ₹123 per
GB offered by incumbent operators. Because of the data price wars, Indian users now
consume much more data than before.

Future Scenario:

• India is fast becoming a digital economy. The current cost of mobile data in India per GB is a
staggeringly small amount when compared to the rest of the world. Triggered by low tariff and
availability of affordable smartphones, it is expected that data usage per phone will increase
exponentially in the next five years
• According to a recent report, India was poised to have over 900 million internet users due
to the increased penetration of affordable smartphones and cheaper internet plans, and
would also have around 2.1 billion internet-connected devices by 2023.
• The coronavirus pandemic is a further catalyst to digital transformation in India as there will be
an increased shift towards online transactions in the country, which also requires more internet
usage. There will be more inclination towards video streaming and online games.
• There will be more internet penetration in rural area of the country. Although, internet users in
rural areas are more than those in urban areas, still there is immense headroom for rural
growth. Close to 70 percent of the rural population does not access the internet. This will further
contribute to an increase in the overall internet population over the next few years
• There will also be an increase in growth in no. of female users in the country. With better
connectivity, quality of service, and affordability of mobile internet, there could be an increase in
rural consumers’ time spent on the internet in future also.
Above all this, India still happens to be the largest untapped internet market in the globe.
Q2. Should Jio Platforms aggressively pitch for 5G adoption in India? How will it benefit the
company?

Answer: 5G is the fifth-generation cellular network technology.

Benefits of 5G

It is designed to improve network connectivity by addressing the legacy issues of speed, latency
and utility, which earlier and current generations of mobile networks have been incapable of
addressing.

5G promises to deliver data at a speed 100 times that of 4G networks. Importantly, it is

designed to transmit data almost instantly with a network latency of less than 10 microseconds.
It will also have an enhanced throughput to handle more simultaneous connections at a time
than current-generation networks.

When Reliance Jio launched its 4G mobile and data services, it became India’s sole 4G-only telecom
provider. While the rest of the market had to support legacy infrastructure for customers on 2G and
3G networks, Reliance Jio was unburdened by such expectations and could focus on creating an
infrastructure network that’s geared towards the 4G and next-gen network, including 5G services.

I think Jio Platforms should aggressively pitch for 5G adoption in India because of following
advantages:

1. There is growing demand of internet connection in the country and people are willing to
opt for higher speed internet services. With 5G, it will continue to add more
subscribers at a rate unprecedented in the telecom world
2. It will provide competitive edge to reliance over its rivals as it will be the first player
in the industry have access to 5G.
3. With the launch of 5g, its ability to proliferate across the country will attract global
technology leaders to forge partnerships with it.
4. Reliance Jio's long-drawn plan to solidify its design and technology base in the country as the
launch of 5G-enabled technologies is expected to be transformative in the telco and other
industries by unlocking various disruptive new technologies.

Well, 5G, the next-generation mobile connectivity is all set to revolutionize the world around us
as it is touted to be 20 times faster than 4G speeds. In addition to the faster internet speeds, the
advent of 5G connectivity will be a catalyst for the progress of industries such as healthcare,
automobiles, VR, AI, IoT and others.

Comparison with 4G:

Compared to third generation mobile networking, 4G enabled previously impossible quality video
streaming and calling on the go, meaning live TV is now routinely watched on the daily commute.
More video streaming, however, has increased congestion in the network. Now with people looking
for faster internet connection, 4G is reaching the technical limits of how much data it can quickly
transfer across blocks of spectrum, a demand for 5G service is already there to remove the
congestion that is prevalent with 4G.

Competitors of Jio:

Airtel - Bharti Airtel has inked a $1 billion (nearly ₹7,636 crore), multi-year deal with Nokia to deploy
the Finnish majors 5G-ready solutions across nine circles in the country. Nokia, which is the largest
4G vendor in Airtel network, will help lay the foundation for providing 5G connectivity in the future
by deploying 300,000 radio units across several spectrum bands in those circles expected to be
completed by 2022.

Huawei - Driven by Huawei, China remains the largest contributor to the global 5G market,
accounting for 46 per cent of the sale of all such devices in 2019. Huawei is also trying to get a
hold into Indian market. In the latest bid to establish itself ahead of India’s 5G trials, and to find
collaborators, the Chinese telecom equipment maker is using the Covid-19 pandemic to
demonstrate how its 5G tech can be useful in the healthcare sector. In April, Huawei held a webinar
to “reveal”, for the “first time ever”, how its technology was used to fight the pandemic. It
showcased how Huawei partnered telecom service providers, medical device and application
providers in China to create 5G-enabled solutions in healthcare like telemedicine consultation, AI-
powered image scanning, and operating mobile trolley that can send food to patients without
human contact. Asked after the webinar if the company’s looking to find partners in other countries
including India, Huawei told that it is “always open to collaboration in every market we operate”.

Vodafone and other competitors are also partnering with outsiders to stay afloat in the competition.
Q4. What are the pros and cons of O2O model for retail business in India? Is this the best
marketing/ operational strategy which Reliance Jio can adopt, leveraging its collaboration
with Facebook?
Answer 4: Online-to-offline (O2O) commerce is a business model that draws potential
customers from online channels to make purchases in physical stores. Techniques that O2O
commerce companies may employ include in-store pick-up of items purchased online,
allowing items purchased online to be returned at a physical store, and allowing customers
to place orders online while at a physical store.
Pros:
1. Brand reputation / appropriation - Branding is much simpler and more efficient with
online capabilities like advertising, social media, mobile wallet, SMS, mobile app, push
messages, proximity services, combined with real-time data analytics, system
integration, and AI.
2. Revenue and loyalty - O2O commerce also lets retailers build up a database of
customers’ information including their name, age, address, interest and even shopping
behaviour. It then improves the customer engagement strategy of the brands, leading to
higher level of customer loyalty. Once a company earns engagement from customers,
that company will see a dramatic increase in revenue, both short-term and long-term.
3. Time to market: This strategy minimizes time to market and accelerates your speed to
market. Collecting customers’ interest and shopping behaviour online, O2O helps reduce
the length of time it takes from a product being conceived until its being available for
sale.
4. Customer experience O2O commerce follows a strategy that allows the retailer to
optimize customer experience. During their shopping journey, customers are provided
with online and offline benefits that they can’t resist. With all the information about the
brands, products or service available online, customers can make quicker and smarter
decisions on what they’re gonna buy. Moreover, the purchasing is much more
convenient and personalized that make them feel it’s so enjoyable to buy something.

Cons:

1. It is difficult to change the user flow led by habits: Customers feel more at ease at a local
store when they browse for products. This makes them more willing to spend money in
a brick and mortar compared to making their orders online.
2. The multi-channel model focuses on online and real-world experiences. It lacks in the
department of delivery services and commodity experience, thus, retaining or increasing
user’s trust is a challenge.
3. It emphasizes a high degree of localization and requires durable process flows to support
the volatile multi-channel commerce.
I think, this is the best strategy that Jio can adopt as Jio already has a good customer base in
the retail sector with Reliance Fresh which functions successfully on the brick-and-mortar
model.
From the marketing point of view, it is a better strategy because It will be easier for Jio to
market its products to a large customer base of mobile users through WhatsApp. In
collaboration with Facebook, a partnership between Jio Mart and WhatsApp was also
announced under which Reliance Retail would have access to WhatsApp's user base of over
400 million. Also, they will be able to connect and advertise their schemes and services to the
local kirana stores, which are major part of O2O model.

From the Operational point of view, it is again a better strategy as this partnership is a
formidable combination of bandwidth and platform player, and would significantly disrupt
the retail industry through its O2O platform model. Combining it with technology will enhance
the customer shopping experience, reduce the time for market and increase the speed of
shopping. With its collaboration with Facebook, it can leverage the technology (through
WhatsApp) for optimizing its operations.

For example, to order from JioMart under the O2O Platform, customers were required to
access Jio Mart through a unique WhatsApp number on their phones. In response, JioMart
would send a link to the customer's WhatsApp chat window, valid for 30 minutes. This link
would direct the customer to a new page wherein he/she had to fill his address and phone
number, after which the catalogue of products was made available to order from. Once the
final order was placed, it would be shared with the local Kirana store on WhatsApp. The
customer would receive a notification with the order and the Kirana store details on his
number. The customer would also receive an alert as soon as the Kirana store billed the order.
The customer would then pick up his/her order from the Kirana store and make payment in
cash.
Q4. What do you understand by Net Neutrality? In the context of investment made by
Facebook in Jio Platforms, what is the likely impact of this duo on net Neutrality?
Answer:
Network neutrality, or simply net neutrality, is the principle that Internet service providers
(ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally, and not discriminate or charge
differently based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment,
source address, destination address, or method of communication.
The primary argument for net neutrality is that if the ISPs give preferential treatment to certain
content, then newer players in the online market will have a much more difficult time competing for
customers and this is in turn will stifle innovation.

In the wake of the Free Basics debacle India became one of the few countries to take a
proactive stance on the issue of net neutrality in the world. Net Neutrality is implemented in
India through the licence agreements which are executed between the Department of
Telecom (‘DoT’) and the ISPs. This means that there is no overarching statute which protects
net neutrality.
In April, 2020 Facebook bought a 9.9% stake in Reliance Jio for Rs. 43, 574 crores. This deal is also
the largest FDI in the technology sector in India and has also raised the issue of net neutrality. Both
Jio and Facebook are present across an ecosystem of apps and services targeted at internet users as
well as small businesses, including Facebook's marketplace offering.

In this backdrop, Facebook has announced the launch of two services which can have potential net
neutrality issues:

• The first is the launch of its short format video sharing app ‘Lasso’ which is supposed to
compete with TikTok. India has about 120 million users on TikTok, which is the highest that
the app has outside of China. According to some analysts as soon as Facebook launches
Lasso on Jio’s platform it will instantly become bigger than TikTok.
• The second initiative of Facebook which has already attracted some controversy is the
WhatsApp Pay initiative. The service had faced obstacles due to data localization
requirements, but since then has gained permission from National Payments Corporation of
India (‘NPCI’) to roll out its service in a phased manner. This will put WhatsApp Pay in direct
competition with Google, Amazon and PayTm, amongst others.
• Any kind of preferential treatment that Jio may potentially give to Facebook can have a
colossal impact on both these sectors. A faster loading Lasso or better connectivity
WhatsApp Pay to Jio users can result in a change of brand loyalty.
• Jio though has rubbished this possibility and has stated that Net Neutrality principles will be
respected.