On the 22nd of October, I broke the news to the World about Reliance 4G LTE trials being commissioned in Mumbai along with Tower Location Information. Subsequently, the Indian Press started tracking Reliance which then divulged,
Infotel Broadband has deployed all its resources to R&D in perfecting high definition quality voice over Long Term Evolution (LTE) with the help of in-house team of young and bright people. This will permit consumers to experience unified communication using single device and using our own built application platform
In my opinion, press reporters didn’t get the Gist of the Reliance release which has a far reaching latent business strategy embedded in it. Then, having recently covered Samsung Chat On services, I also had to thoroughly study Tencent’s QQIM, Wei Xin etc [More on this will be covered later] So what exactly is the Big R&D initiative from Reliance Infotel as hinted by the company ? As stated in the Title, I believe Reliance Jio Infocomm Broadband is potentially building an India Centric Voice / Video over LTE App that will act as Mobile Social Network.
Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance is a Oil & Gas company with hardly any R&D / Patents in the Telecommunications sector. Having realized the power of Platform Play such as Skype, Chat On, QQIM, Wei Xin, etc Reliance didn’t want to let the opportunity that it has on hands to build a India / Bharat Centric App to either Google or Yahoo or Microsoft. Thus they silently roped in vendors[yes Multiple] but to substantiate here, I’m going to refer to only one who has gone on record to say that Reliance Industries is a OEM / System Provider Client SPIRIT DSP a Russian Embedded Software company with expertise in Voice and Video Signal Processing. Reliance has licensed SPIRIT DSP’s TeamSpirit Voice & Video Engine PC and TeamSpirit Voice&Video Engine Mobile
Product Note of TeamSpirit Voice & Video Engine PC also states that it is a part of the larger unified conferencing solution. This could potentially be used for SMEs Centric Applications or even PC Based Conferencing. The Mobile Engine is specifically fine tuned for iOS / Android which makes our guess stronger that Reliance could building on top of the Android Platform which is open sourced by Google.
We do not know the final form and shape of the product / products, but the broader strategy of Reliance is Clear – Ride the Application layer Opportunity with India / Bharat [ Regional] Centric Apps and Services along with the Telecom Network play. To further get the gist of why the Apps Platform play is so crucial, you might want to read on how Skype is Transforming itself and getting ready for commonality of services across devices and platform.