Jio AirFiber launched in India, plans to start at Rs 599

The Rs 899 plan and Rs 1,199 plan raise your speeds up to 100mbps along with all the additional digital TV channels and OTT apps the Rs 599 plan provides. (Representative Image)

Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) Chairman Mukesh Ambani announced on August 28 that its telecom arm Reliance Jio will launch their AirFiber internet service from Ganesh Chaturthi, September 19.

The company has now officially launched the service, along with plans and pricing for AirFiber.

While that is great, you may find yourself asking what is AirFiber?, and how is it different from JioFiber?

Over the air internet

Jio's optical fiber-based broadband service, JioFiber, has now reached over 10 million subscribers across India. The company says that on average, a household consumes 280GB of data per month, which is ten times larger than Jio's per-capita mobile data consumption.

Those are fantastic numbers, but they are held back by one thing - the need for architecture to facilitate wired broadband connections. In cities, this wouldn't be too much of a problem, but in remote areas, it can be challenging to lay down the optical fiber required for the connection.

Jio says their optical fiber spans over 1.5 million km across India but it's still not enough to reach every home.

This is where AirFiber comes in. Using Jio's extensive 5G data network, AirFiber uses a set of receivers and routers to gather data from existing 5G towers, and beam them to your home.

This usually involves a router placed inside the home, and an appliance on the outside with a 5G SIM in it. The appliance gathers 5G data from nearby towers and transmits them to the router for up to 1Gbps broadband speeds.

The obvious benefit of this, is reaching remote areas where infrastructure is hard to set-up. It also makes use of existing 5G towers. The drawback is if you are in an area that experiences poor network reception, this might not be for you.

The JioAir Fiber pricing at a glance. (Image: Reliance Jio)

Plans and pricing

At the outset, AirFiber will roll out to 8 cities - Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune.

The pricing for the plans starts at Rs 599, which will net you 30mbps of speeds along with access to more than 550 digital channels, and fourteen OTT apps which include Netflix, Amazon Prime and JioCinema Premium.

The Rs 899 plan and Rs 1,199 plan raise your speeds up to 100mbps along with all the additional digital TV channels and OTT apps the Rs 599 plan provides.

The Rs 1,499 plan gives you access to 300mbps speed and all the extra content from the previous plans. It will cost you Rs 2,499 to upgrade to 500mbps and Rs 3,999 to upgrade to 1Gbps.

Jio will also include a WiFI router and a 4K Smart Set Top Box in the pricing for these plans, which means you will not have to pay extra for these.

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