MUMBAI: From connecting India to building its digital future, the recently-held Jio experience meet at Reliance Corporate Park, Navi Mumbai, showcased the IPO-bound entity’s scale and capabilities.
Away from the humdrum, the verdant surroundings of the sprawling corporate office is where Jio is housed. A halt at the network operation centre (NOC) reveals a gigantic dashboard that captures 600 crore-plus terabyte of data.
This is the nerve centre, where Jio’s people are at work, interpreting humongous data. Consider this: as far as the device penetration goes, Vivo (23.3%), Xiaomi (15%), Oppo (13.2%), Realme (11.8%) top the chart followed by Samsung (4.7%), Apple (4.5%), Jiophone (3.9%), Motorola (3.5%) and OnePlus (1.7%).
Similarly, the tracking also reveals YouTube and Insta to be the top two platforms attracting users followed by FB, Google, Whastapp, Snapchat and Sharechat. Backed by an operational support system, the guzzling of data is happening at a speed and pace that is mind-boggling. Maharashtra, Bihar and Gujarat feature as top three states for Jio’s 4G and 5G network penetration, while Tamil Nadu ranks 8th.
While top officials of Jio gave an overview of the scale and size of the operations to the visiting media, patiently answering questions, the next halt is at the experience centre, the hub of action, that shows the tectonic transition.
Ahead of Jio Platforms’ much-anticipated public market debut, Reliance’s digital arm enters its second decade as something far bigger than a telecom company. It is now a technology platform spanning connectivity, devices, cloud, artificial intelligence and enterprise solutions.
In just 10 years, Jio has achieved a scale that even global technology giants such as Google and Meta have taken considerably longer to build in their respective ecosystems. But its more significant achievement is the speed with which it has moved from connecting consumers to becoming the platform on which multiple digital experiences can operate.
Jio entered the market in 2016 and fundamentally disrupted the economics of mobile data. By March 2026, it had 524.4 million customers, including 268.5 million 5G users, while its network carried nearly 60% of India’s wireless data traffic.
The scale has now become the foundation for a much broader technology play. Jio has developed an end-to-end Made-in-India 5G stack, operates broadband and fixed wireless services, and is building an ecosystem encompassing smartphones and feature phones, television, cloud computing, IoT, private 5G and cybersecurity.
Its technology development workforce stands at 11,303, with 6,817 patent applications filed. The next frontier is increasingly visible in consumer technology.
Jio is gearing up for launch of Frames, its smart-glasses play, signalling an ambitious effort to participate in the next generation of computing interfaces rather than merely provide the connectivity behind them. That platform approach is also evident in the home.
Jio has been servicing 27.1 million home broadband customers by March 2026, while JioCloud PC and cloud gaming point towards computing moving beyond individual devices into the network. For enterprises, the same infrastructure is being extended through private 5G, IoT, cloud and AI. JioBrain adds an intelligence layer capable of predictive insights, anomaly detection and network automation.
Jio Platforms’ revenue from operations rose from Rs 1.10 lakh crore in FY24 to Rs 1.47 lakh crore in FY26, while profit reached Rs 30,049 crore.
The IPO, therefore, comes at an inflection point: Jio is no longer simply selling connectivity. It is emerging as a platform that connects people, devices, homes, businesses and increasingly AI, at a scale few tech companies have replicated in such a short span.
(The journalist was in Mumbai as part of a media entourage to the Jio facility)