Biography | Mukesh Ambani — The Marine Lines Hall Where He Made Voice Calls Free

On 1 September 2016 Mukesh Ambani stood at the Birla Matushri Sabhagar on Vithaldas Thackersey Marg, next to Bombay Hospital in Marine Lines, and told Reliance shareholders that Jio was going live.

The Indian Express recorded the hall. Business Standard, Business Today and Hindustan Times recorded the terms: domestic voice free, no roaming charges inside India, data at 50 rupees a gigabyte, a welcome period of free service from 5 September to 31 December 2016, and a target of 100 million customers as fast as the network could take them.

This was not a product launch in a rented ballroom. It was the 42nd annual general meeting of Reliance Industries, the same ritual at which the company had for years reported refinery throughputs and petrochemical spreads.

Jio had been in employee and Lyf-handset trials. From 5 September anyone could take a SIM. The commercial tariff clock was set for the last day of the year.

The effect on Indian telecom is now a textbook case: incumbents cut prices, several did not survive the decade in their old form, and smartphone data stopped being a scarce good.

The hall itself is an older Mumbai civic room, plot 19, New Marine Lines, 400020. Shareholders had been coming here for years. On this morning the agenda item that mattered was not the dividend.

Ambani dedicated the network to the Digital India programme then being pushed from Delhi. The sentence that changed the market was simpler: Jio customers would not pay for voice.

A visitor finds an auditorium, not an exchange. The switch gear lived elsewhere. The decision was spoken here.

Photo: Mukesh Ambani, World Economic Forum / Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons