Mukesh Ambani LED Reliance Industries (RIL), which is set to launch its 4G services in India, will make its own mobile phones, according to a report of Economic Times.
In December last year we reported that RIL will offer Rs 3,500 tablets for its 4G customers. And now it has come out from its annual general body meeting as to how it wants to reduce the price of its devices.
RIL is basically plans to use cloud computing technology which allows computing to be done on a remote server and therefore reduces the hardware requirement on the handset itself.
This reduces the cost of the handset (low hardware=low cost) without impacting the performance and also makes people use data services more.
The model is not new, even Google has used cloud technology with its Chrome Book. However, success has eluded this model especially in countries like India where Airtel, MTNL, Rcom have all tried it with NetPCs.
But there is a lot of difference that RIL will bring to the tablet and that might make it a successful model. One, its network will be capable of delivering 100 Mbps speed making it easier and way faster to compute than 2G or even 3G networks.
The second biggest and probably a more important difference lies in the pricing of data services which has traditionally been very high in India.
But with RIL this will change as they are likely to offer very cheap unlimited plans, and (though not official) also plans to offer 10 paisa per MB pricing, making it really affordable to use data services.
The company has also said that it will set up its own tower infrastructure and not share it with some existing tower company, as it is finding it costlier that way.