Indian mobile operator Jio with 330 million customers will create its own blockchain

Indian telecommunications operator Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited plans to create one of the world’s largest blockchains.

Shri Mukesh D. Ambani, chairman and managing director of the company, said blockchain technology has entered one of three main areas of Jio’s expansion. Since debuting in 2015, the company has become the operator of one of India’s largest mobile networks, with a current user base of over 330 million people.

“Over the next 12 months, Jio will deploy one of the largest blockchain networks in the world with tens of thousands of nodes operating from day one throughout India,” Ambani promised.

He also noted the role of blockchain in empowering Indian consumers.

“Using the blockchain, we have the opportunity to invent a completely new privacy model in which customer data is owned and controlled by citizens, not corporations – especially global corporations,” he said.

The exact structure of the new Jio blockchain remains unclear, as Ambani did not go into details about how users could potentially interact with or control the data.

Telecommunications operators are increasingly turning their attention to blockchain. In May, it became known that Indian telecommunications companies will apply
blockchain to fight spam, and in July KPMG, Microsoft and R3 announced that they would create
blockchain for telecommunication billing.