Jio marks 10 years, eyes global expansion with made-in-India tech

MUMBAI: Ten years ago this month, an entire industry got a rude awakening. On September 5, 2016, Reliance Jio Infocomm switched on commercial services and did something no Indian telco had dared: it made voice calls free. Rivals scrambled, tariffs collapsed, and a country that had rationed its megabytes suddenly had data to burn. A decade on, Jio wants a sequel, only this time the stage is the planet, not just Uttar Pradesh.

The numbers from the first act are hard to argue with. Jio signed up 50 million subscribers in just 83 days and crossed the 100 million mark inside six months, a pace that still makes rival telcos wince. It has since become the fastest growing connectivity subscriber base anywhere outside China, adding close to 500 million customers over ten years, more than the top three American operators managed between them, and 1.3 times what its nearest Indian rival pulled off. As of June 30, 2026, Jio counted 533.3 million customers and now shifts over 23 exabytes of data traffic every month, putting it among the largest data operators on earth.

None of this happened by accident. The origin story goes back to December 28, 2015, when Jio began quiet trials with staff before extending the network to friends and employees of Reliance Industries. Even after the formal commercial launch, services stayed free for six months under a company scheme, a masterstroke that let Jio buy market share while rivals were still totting up losses. By November 2019, Reliance Jio had been folded into Jio Platforms as part of a broader corporate reshuffle, setting up the structure now steering the next chapter.

That next chapter, according to Akash Ambani, managing director of Jio Platforms and chairman of Reliance Jio, is about exporting Indian-made technology rather than importing it. In a letter to employees marking the anniversary, he argued that Jio has moved well beyond telecoms, building original technology in connectivity, digital products, enterprise solutions and artificial intelligence, and that the task now is to take that technology global. A company official said on Saturday that Jio is setting its sights squarely on international markets with this made-in-India stack.

There is a neat symmetry to the ambition. Jio’s entire pitch a decade ago was that India did not need to wait for the West to hand it affordable connectivity; it could build its own and undercut everyone. Ambani’s letter leans on the same logic for phase two, framing India as a creator of technology for the world rather than merely a consumer of it. Whether Jio can pull off abroad what it did at home is the real test. Telecom networks do not travel well across borders, spectrum and regulation are jealously guarded, and Jio’s dominance was built partly on Reliance’s deep pockets and a captive billion-plus market that will not exist elsewhere.

Still, the AI and enterprise software push is a smarter bet than trying to replicate a subscriber land grab overseas. Digital products and cloud-style enterprise tools scale across borders far more easily than towers and spectrum licences do, and Jio’s home market gives it a testing ground of a size few competitors can match. Ten years ago, sceptics doubted a newcomer could rewrite India’s telecom economics. This time, the doubts are about geography rather than ambition. Given Jio’s record of proving doubters wrong once already, it would be unwise to bet against Akash Ambani doing it again.