RCP abuzz with action; Reliance Jio in final stage of tests

The sprawling administrative hub of Reliance Industries at Ghansoli in Navi Mumbai-Reliance Corporate Park (RCP)-stocks up to become the nerve centre of the company's new digital services business, Reliance Jio.

The company is in the final phase of tests at RCP, co-coordinating the functions of the network operations center (NOC), data center and the development center, say executives.

The employees have started using the data service, through Reliance's own brand phones LYF. The commercial launch of Jio is expected before the end of this financial year.

"Jio's ecosystem is 99 per cent ready. But we are extremely careful to launch with the flawless service. Beta trials are continuing. We started with 10,000 testers, covering an average of 100 km everyday about a couple of months back. But it has been enhanced now," says an executive.

Mukesh Ambani comes to the campus in his chopper at least twice every week. Earlier, he was mostly working out of his Nariman Point office at Maker IV. Ambani's twin children Isha and Akash work as full-timers at RCP from the newly built swanky 11-storied head-quarter of operations, 'TC 22'.

The campus was added to Reliance's fold when it acquired ailing petrochemicals and plastics division of erstwhile rival National Organic Chemicals Industries (Nocil) about a decade back. Later, they constructed towers there to move the administrative departments of Reliance Industries.

Ambani's Man Friday Manoj Modi heads Jio's execution team at the campus. Ambani's wife Nita also comes to the campus frequently as she advises on the marketing plan and builds synergies between Reliance Foundation and RJio. Marketing and advertising experts like Piyush Pandey and Sohail Shet and senior management of Saatchi & Saatchi are also often seen in the Jio office, say insiders. RJio has over 20,000 employees on rolls.

Another attraction at RCP is the newly built data center in box-structure, which spans larger than a football ground. The four-story high building has a floor area of 0.5 million square feet (mn sq ft). It houses the servers of RJio and will facilitate the planned services like direct-to-home (DTH) television with a bouquet of almost 2,000 channels, video-on-demand, mailing and messaging services and voice over Internet telephony (VoIP). In addition to the data centre, the company also sets up its major network operations center at RCP. Learning and development center, Technology labs (for network and device testing) and Jio experience center are the other attractions.

The company aims to operationalise 0.65 million squire feet (mn sq ft) data center space across three locations before the launch-0.5 mn sq ft at RCP and 0.15 mn sq ft at Nagpur and NCR, together. The size will be enhanced to 1.5 mn sq ft in the next three years, when the RCP size will doubled. The plan is to build data centres across India-Jamnagar (Gujarat), Mauda (Nagpur), NCR (New Delhi), Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangaluru-for the information storage. The rival Vodafone has one data centre each in Pune and Bangalore. Airtel has outsourced the job to third party.

The company has opened an outlet for selling its own device, LYF, to the employees at RCP. The cost of it comes to Rs 15,000-25,000. But the employees get it at 25 per cent discount. Each sim card will have free data of 75 gigabyte for 90 days. The calls will be possible only with VoLTE (Voice over LTE). Jio applications are free with the device, says an employee.

RJio has also set up a new pan-India sales and distribution network for channeling the 4G handsets and devices to over 1.5 lakh electronic retailers in the country. They signed exclusive distribution deals with Lenovo, LG, Intex and Micromax for the sourcing exclusive VoLTE handset models.

In addition, the company has entered into agreements with five major vendors including Chinese multinational ZTE Corporation and Taiwanese major Foxconn Technology for sourcing devices for distributing LYF brand phones. It plans to sell the handsets through the Digital Xpress stores of Reliance Retail.