Reliance Jio May Have Largest Intra-City Optic Fibre Network: Credit Suisse

Telecom operator Reliance Jio Infocomm is gearing up to build the country's biggest mobile back-end facilities for its 4G services launch by March 2015 while its own optical fibre network within city areas may already be the largest among peers, says Credit Suisse.

"We suspect RJio already has the largest intra-city optic fibre network with over 85,000km across 700-800 towns. This is a major differentiator for mobile backhaul in an industry with sub-10 percent fibre penetration into towers," a Credit Suisse report by analysts Sunil Tirumalai and Chunky Shah said.

(Also see: Reliance Jio in tower sharing agreement with American Towers for 4G rollout)

All calls and mobile data are largely carried by optical fibre cable (OFC) network in telecom networks. As per the report, RJio services will be launched by March 2015.

The analysts said that till now, Reliance Communications (RCom) was believed to have the largest fibre network among private operators, with an intra-city network of about 70,000 route kilometres (Rkm).

The report said that channel checks of Credit Suisse suggest that over the last couple of years, RJio has completed the roll-out of about 100,000Rkm of OFC.

Credit Suisse also said it expects that RJio is could be soon among largest data centres companies in India has it has already build about 5 facility.

"We understand RJio has also built about 5 data centres, with many more expected to come. This could make them among the largest data centre companies in India. We understand that the long term game plan is to have over 40 data centers across the country," the report said.

Tata Communications at present has 11 data centres in India the maximum. As per the report, RCom has 9 centres Airtel 7 and Vodafone 2.

"Moreover, our channel checks suggest that the bandwidth of fibre cable being rolled out by RJio is superior. The normal cables used by the industry have 12-24 fibre threads, while RJio's appears to be using mostly cables with 288 fibres, in some cases 96 fibres," the report said.