Rel Jio to foray into automobile telematics this year

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani's telecom venture Reliance Jio Infocomm is planning to foray into automobile telematics with the launch of a device that will control vehicle's movement and alert owner about fuel and battery through a mobile app.

"Reliance Jio is ready with a car connected device that will have multiple features like immobilise car at the time of theft, alert owner about car movement, locate car and also provide wi-fi within car. The owner needs to use Jio sim in the device to avail benefits," an industry source said.

The company is in advance talks with automobile companies to launch it very soon.

"There are lots of factors that determine price, but price of the car connected device is estimated to be either equal to or less than its Jio's mifi device which costs around Rs 2,000," the source said.

With help of Jio's car management device, the owner will get information about the way his driver is driving the car, the movement of vehicle can be restricted within a geography, switch on AC of car from any remote location, get alert of car break etc.

"Jio is working on modalities on its sales model for existing cars as well," the source said.

The device and application has been internally developed by Jio but the hardware device will be initially imported from China.

"Jio has asked its device vendor to start making it in India after initial roll-out," the source said.

Besides this, the company is also scaling up its fibre to the home project for which it is running pilot in some cities including Delhi and Mumbai.

"With Fibre to the home, Jio will focus on automatic entire home from entertainment to home surveillance to utility management," the source said.

Jio has touched a customer base 7.24 crore and claims to be adding 1 lakh mobile subscribers per day.

The company has set target to cross 10 crore customers by March 31, 2017.