Desi Slice 3: Jio- What Happens When a Large Voice Provider Taps Into AI?

Sep 03: Seize Opportunitites In India's Race to $5T! Like Jio - Money Loves Speed!

Photo by Singkham: https://www.pexels.com/photo/clear-light-bulb-planter-on-gray-rock-1108572/

What Else Is Jio Up to:

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Industries, announced several key initiatives at the company's annual general meeting (AGM), last week. A lot also went unsaid - a possible IPO for Jio, timing of the IPO but familiar noises rang in investors’ ears: a bonus share announcement, some CAPEX slashed, some workforce dropped, and a renewed dream for utter dominance in whatever they chose to do. That is Jio!

AI-Ready Data Center Network:

• Plans to build an AI-ready data center in Jamnagar will support Jio's AI initiatives and provide a robust data storage and processing infrastructure, fed by the company's green energy.

• Multiple AI Inferencing facilities across captive RIL locations throughout the country -aiming to create the lowest AI inferencing cost in the world.

Submarine Cable Capacity Buildout

Data Centers will require fat OFC terminating points and IXC co-lo or hosting locations as close as possible to prevent round trip delays. For this usually, the bottlenecks are in submarine cables which are undersea OFC that are responsible for carrying wholesale bulk IP traffic across continents. This has gradually been going up for India too with a coastline of over 6k km but still, the OFC Submarine landing stations are somewhat limited.

• This bottleneck will also get eliminated now as fatter pipes will become available with capacity augmentation coming in the form of new cable investments.

• India is set to get a major boost, with three large undersea cable projects — 2Africa Pearls, India-Asia-Express (IAX), and India-Europe-Express (IEX) — slated to go onstream between October and next March, expanding existing capacity by more than four times.

• IEX will have a capacity of over 200 Tbps, covering 9,775 km from Mumbai to the Persian Gulf and further to Europe. IAX will also have a capacity of more than 200 Tbps, extending more than 16,000 km, starting from Mumbai, and connecting Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka.

• Jio and China Mobile are jointly investing in the IAX and IEX cable properties with a capacity of about 200 TBPS each.

Jio Brain

• The unveiling of JioBrain, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed to power Jio's 5G network and enable a wide range of AI applications. JioBrain is described as a "neural network" allowing Jio to build a "true 5G network".

• Investment of ₹2 lakh crore ($25 billion roughly) in AI research and development over the next five years.

• An open invitation to developers and startups to build their own AI applications on the JioBrain platform.

Societal Transformation:

Reliance Jio has transformed India into a "premium digital society" with its 5G services, gaining 130 million 5G users in just two years.

Jio's success: Affordable pricing, high-speed data, and innovative services have bridged the digital divide in India. Jio will continue to invest in 5G technology, expand its network, and develop new use cases for 5G, such as immersive education, remote healthcare, and smart cities. The company has filed a few thousand patents already in 5G, 6G, AI, and cloud technology areas.

Jobs: Jio has created over 10 million direct and indirect jobs in the digital sector, contributing significantly to India's economic growth.

Jio 5G

• World's fastest 5G roll out, 5G adoption, and lowest cost of handsets - $96 with 130 mil 5G subscribers in 2 years and an overall subscriber base of 490 mil.

• Jio 5G is the world’s fastest growing and already the largest 5G SA powered by its own Jio5GStack (Radisys IP and in-house enhancements)

• Have crossed 30 million homes with broadband services not to mention content play where IPL digital rights for example had over 400 million people watching the World Cup cricket finals on Jio digital channels. (probably higher than that at some points of the game).

• Also a BB provider to 1.5 mil MSMEs and 5K large enterprises already wired with Jio fiber or Air Fiber with FWA to ensure flawless connectivity to the net (I am typing this over a laptop connected to Jio fiber at home with 300Mbps connection!!!)

• In the last 12 months alone, Jio claims a brand new set of 43 mil new subscribers on broadband services. The Jio corporate revenues have roughly crossed Rs 1L Cr ($12.5 bil) annually with Rs 20k cr profits (about $2.5 bil) and EBITDA of about 50.1%.

• The target for Jio Home BB FWA is 100 million homes.

• India still has about 200 mil 2G subscribers on feature phones (non-smart phones) who are the next target to migrate to 4G/5G.

Jio networks today carry about 8% of global data traffic (GLOBAL!!!) exceeding 30GB per user per month at the lowest data rates anywhere in the world - all this achieved in just 8 years. This case study is worth doing compared to large global telcos that have been around for decades and are still unmatched with this level of operating efficiency.

Jio Cloud

It is also expected that Jio’s 100GB free cloud storage will throw a challenge to Google One and iCloud’s dominance -something that Microsoft has not been able to beat so far. Jio’s free 100GB per user (against Google’s Rs 130 ($1.6) will certainly move traffic towards Jio. Jio will likely use this traffic to train its AI models (anonymized unformatted data for training may not be legally challenged and is likely happening, with a single line of consent buried in the footnote when you accept terms and conditions?).

Jio Voice

Years ago Google started picking up voice samples, from speech conversations to power a future weapon -voice search. (remember Project Vaani, anyone? - this from Indian language speakers). It is believed that this is now over 14k hours of voice samples across 58 languages from 80k speakers across 80 districts (public domain info). Karya has done something similar too earlier (check this post of mine below)

Jio’s current mobile user base is 480 million and it would be the most authentic voice samples possible for Indian languages (nowhere would a telco have this leverage unless they are also an AI player and almost no one is). Covering every aspect of voice, diction, modulation, and natural language expression in every dialect possible will suddenly become the nuclear arsenal for one of the largest profitable telcos on the planet as they enter Voice AI space. This will be an unfair advantage for Jio. Of course, it ought to be done with legal permissions and consent but we all know why that may not be a big problem in India.

Interestingly, of late, we find an increasing number of Indian companies standing up to their global counterparts throwing stiff competition in the domestic market: Ola brought it its homegrown Krutrim to offload its Azure cloud dependency and its own Ola maps against G maps (saving about $12 mil a year in enterprise license fee).

Career Opportunities in Jio

There is probably no place that will pay top $ to the right candidate like Jio - I used to know several top executives a decade ago making Rs 1cr. annually. The scale and challenges of doing world-scale projects you will probably not find anywhere else. Jio will hire you for who you are and what you bring to the table -and there need not be an open or defined position as such.

Jio is looking for top-notch engineers, scientists, and AI experts with experience in the areas of AI, ML, energy mobilization, green power, retail, and next-generation automotive technologies for e-commerce and engineering capabilities to scale these solutions to a population scale.

Yes, of course, you have to deal with the culture - it is largely democratic but there will be issues and a top-down flow of control that you will need to respect.

Startup Opportunities

Jio is open to working with tech innovation engines or startups that make sense. Do not discount this as a hard thing - it will be hard anyway but if you know how to play your cards well there are so many folks who have successfully sold and exited from the venture and are happy. I can name a few.

My Experience with Jio / Reliance Group:

You will hear people saying all kinds of rubbish about RIL being a large player and killing small players and so on - but my experience of supplying MI, MR, Strategy, and Global market info and databases to Reliance Group was always a pleasure. My custom version used to go directly to the Chairman's Office by request and it was faithfully done for about 5 years or so -between 2010-2016.

Together with our global Consulting partner Light Reading in the US we even won a multi-year global consulting report framework deal at that time. And with NexTV also I managed to get a multi-year OTT consulting report for the group in the following years - our payments were always on the dot, any negotiation was done beforehand and there was zero high-handedness.

I have heard and know of some technology suppliers who have gotten the short end of the stick and that could have been because of poor economics. One needs to be careful while dealing with any large buyer (ask Walmart for example or Amazon in the US - and it is no different).

The earlier version of Reliance which was RCOM, I remember, was talking about volumes of 3G phones in the range of 5 million handsets per month, and the original LG team that came in for discussions was expecting a demand of about 5-6 million devices a year. That team had to fly back and return fresh with a completely new set of numbers as they were not prepared with the numbers earlier on. This is a true incident as the person heading LG device sales was a good friend of mine. (We are talking about 2011 I think).

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1. Owner: Sridhar Pai Tonse - Tonse Pai Academy.
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