During a presentation, a senior business official stated that Jio has finished 5G network coverage planning for the top 1,000 cities in the country and that the company is expanding its fiber capacity as well as operating pilots across many sites.

Reliance Jio Infocomm president Kiran Thomas said on Friday evening that the business has formed teams to focus on specific solutions for 5G deployment in India.

“5G coverage planning has been completed for 1,000 top cities across the country. Jio has been doing trials on advanced use cases across healthcare and industrial automation on its 5G network,” Jio said in a statement.

During the presentation, Thomas stated that the company is conducting a 5G pilot in several locations and that network design for the 5G rollout is underway using 3D maps and ray tracing technologies.

“We are using the most modern approaches towards network planning, especially 3D maps and ray tracing technology because 5G is a pretty unique technology, which requires very advanced network planning techniques, and we are undertaking that for all of India so that as and when the approvals are received for us to roll out this network, we will be well geared-up to prioritize our rollout, where we can make the maximum contribution,” Thomas said.

The 5G spectrum auction is planned to take place in the first quarter of the following fiscal year. Reliance Jio recorded a net increase of 1.02 crore consumers in the third quarter, bringing the total number of customers to 42.1 crore year on year (YoY). On a quarter-to-quarter basis, however, the subscriber base shrank.

Jio’s ARPU remained practically constant on a reported numerical basis, but the company’s average revenue per user (ARPU) climbed by 8.4% year on year to Rs 151.6 after accounting for interconnection usage charges (IUC) that it had to pay to other carriers.

“We closed the quarter at 421 million subscribers. That was a reduction of 8.4 million, but the gross addition continued to be very strong 34.6 million. And the reduction was really on account of SIM consolidation and some of the less active customers, now with tariff increases, etc, looking at consolidating uses in a single SIM,” Reliance Jio head of strategy Anshuman Thakur said.

From January 1, 2021, there will be no IUC fees. For the third quarter ending December 2021, Jio Platforms’ net profit increased by 8.8% to Rs 3,795 crore. At the same time a year before, it made a net profit of Rs 3,486 crore. From October to December 2020, the revenue from operations climbed by 5.76 percent to Rs 24,176 crore, up from Rs 22,858 crore.

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (RJIL), Jio Platforms’ telecom services subsidiary, reported a 9.8% increase in net profit for the quarter, to Rs 3,615 crore, up from Rs 3,291 crore the year before. RJIL’s operating revenue climbed 4.62 percent to Rs 19,347 crore from Rs 18,492 crore the previous year.