On September 1, Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries, did something that was simultaneously belated but also unexpected. At the annual general meeting of his mammoth company, he announced the launch of Reliance Jio, his group’s mobile network in India.
On the back of a reported $22 billion investment in setting up Jio, Ambani vowed to upend the $50 billion telecom industry using free voice calls, zero roaming charges and aggressively priced data packs.
The launch was belated because Reliance paid over $3 billion for Jio’s core – the 4G spectrum over which it runs – in 2010.