Revealed at the Reliance AGM[1], the Jio Phone[2] is the talk of the town right now, even as much of the hardware remains shrouded under mystery. Well, Qualcomm[3] and Spreadtrum[4] have now announced[5] their chips power the new Jio[6] phone. The device will use a Qualcomm 205 processor that was launched in March and comes with LTE support - including 4G VoLTE, while Spreadtrum did not reveal much about the nature of its partnership.
Furthermore, investment banking firm Jeffries believes[7] that the Jio Phone will pose a substantial challenge to the competition. Jefferies said in a report said, "The monthly plan compares favourably against the blended ARPU (average revenue per unit) of top three incumbents, but it does provide a cap. Even though the pricing is not as disruptive as feared, it will still be a stiff challenge to incumbents to protect their subscriber market share."
In addition to this, the Cellular Operators Association of India[8] (COAI) has termed the launch of JioPhone as "clever marketing" and said[9] Jio selling the device at effective zero price is an attempt to save government levies like licence fee by the company.
"Previously, when you bundled handset along with services the 14 or 11 percent that an operator paid as licence fee got imposed on handsets. So as an operator one can't compete with a handset seller because handset seller is not required to pay this extra levy of 11-14 percent," COAI Director General Rajan S Mathews said. He said a bundled offer would have increased cost of providing service for operators. "Reliance Jio offer is clever marketing position... they are saying...