16 January 2025
Reliance Jio is moving to ramp up onboarding of new customers for its AirFiber 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) business over the next year in an effort to boost 5G ARPUs ahead of a planned IPO later this year.
Jio has been scaling up distribution and optimising the onboarding process for its AirFiber service to enable it to add at least 1 million new customers every 30 days. Jio had over 2.8 million AirFiber connections at the end of September 2024, and was projected to add another 1.9 million home broadband users by the end of 2024.
Jio is banking on AirFiber to boost network traffic on its 5G network as well as its monthly 5G ARPU, which is three times higher for AirFiber than for Jio’s mobile 5G ARPU. Despite having one of the largest 5G subscriber bases in the world, Jio has been struggling to monetise 5G after spending a reported US$25 billion to roll out its nationwide network. Part of that has to do with initially promoting the service with unlimited data plans, as well as migrating low-value JioBharat phone users to 5G, which has kept ARPU relatively low.
Growing its AirFiber business by a million new customers a month could enable Jio to boost 5G ARPU faster.
