Reliance Jio joins Cellular Operators Association of India as core member

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the telecom arm of Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Ltd, has ended its rivalry with GSM operators' body and on Monday joined the Cellular Operators' Association of India (COAI) as a core member, a COAI statement said.

The move comes ahead of Reliance Jio Infocomm's (RJIL) pan-India roll-out of 4G services next year.

''We are delighted that Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJIL) has joined us in our common endeavor to roll out innovative and affordable mobile broadband services to the citizens of India,'' COAI's director general Rajan S Mathews said.

''We are all acutely aware of the significance of the expansion of advanced data networks such as LTE in our country. This will hasten our broadband penetration, which currently pales in comparison to the penetration rates in both the developed and developing countries,'' Sandip Das, managing director of Reliance Jio Infocomm, said. ''We see an opportunity for the policy makers and the industry to be aligned with respect to understanding what stands between the average Indian and their crying demand for better broadband! We see ourselves contributing significantly by building out a nationwide high speed data network,'' he added.

COAI had six core members, which included Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular, Aircel, Unitech Wireless (now Telewings Communications) and Videocon Communications (now Videocon Telecom), before RJIL's joining the association.

Besides the core members, it also has 12 associate members, including Alcatel-Lucent India, Cisco Systems India, Ericsson India, IBM India, GTL Infrastructure, Huawei Technologies, Indus Towers, Intel Corporation, Nokia Networks, Qualcomm India and ZTE India. Besides, it has recently added social media companies like Facebook as an associate member.

With Reliance Jio joining the group the association looked forward to working with the government to achieve the ambitious targets of creating the new 'i-way', smart cities and broadband for all, COAI's Rajan said.

Earlier, COAI had opposed the Department of Telecom's issuance of a unified licence to RJI against payment of about Rs1,673 crore in 2013.

The unified licence allowed RJI to offer full-fledged mobile services, a development COAI's members opposed as the company was given licence at a far cheaper price than what they had paid.