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Telecom giant Reliance Jio has committed to delivering 5G services in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai by Diwali 2022, and a pan-India rollout by December 2023.
Speaking at the Reliance Industries’ annual general meeting on Monday, RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani said Jio’s 5G network will be the largest and most advanced in the world. Jio’s three-fold advantage of a standalone 5G architecture, the largest and best mix of 5G spectrum and the new carrier aggregation technology will be an unparalleled combination of coverage, capacity, quality and affordability, Ambani said.
Reliance Jio was the most aggressive and successful bidder at the recently concluded 5G auctions. The top buyer spent ₹88,078 crore, more than double that of second-placed Bharti Airtel Ltd.
Announcements made at the Reliance AGM
The billionaire added that RIL has committed a total investment of ₹2-lakh crore for Jio’s 5G network, which is is already outfitted with Jio’s indigenously developed end-to-end 5G stack “with sufficient capacity to serve hundreds of millions of users from day one,” said Ambani.
As Jio is the sole operator to establish a standalone 5G network from day one, the company is labelling it as the “True-5G-Network.” It also announced a 5G solution to allow customers to enjoy fiber-like data speeds over the air called JioAirFiber, a wireless, simple, single-device solution to have a Wi-Fi hotspot at home.
“With single device JioAirFiber, it will be really easy to quickly connect any home or office to gigabit-speed internet. With the simplicity of JioAirFiber, hundreds of millions of homes and offices can be connected to ultra-high-speed broadband in a very short period. With it, India can rank among the top-10 nations, even for fixed broadband,” noted Ambani.
Jio Cloud PC
Another 5G solution announced at the AGM was Jio Cloud PC, which will be a virtual PC hosted in the cloud. Using this product, people can do away with expenses related to buying computer hardware and upgrading it and can use a virtual PC instead. 5G use cases around cloud gaming, private networks, robotics and automation were also announced at the AGM.
In addition to its partnerships with some of the world’s leading technology companies, Jio has now partnered with Qualcomm to develop 5G solutions for India that can be exported worldwide.
Ambani also noted that Reliance is leveraging its existing partnerships with tech giants such as Meta, Google and Microsoft for 5G. The company is already developing 5G use cases in collaboration with these players.
“We believe India’s vibrant digital ecosystem will play a critical role in shaping the metaverse and bring new possibilities in Education, Healthcare and Commerce 4.0,” noted Ambani.
Ultra-affordable smartphones
The RIL chair also said they are collaborating with Google to develop ultra-affordable 5G smartphones for India. “We will also leverage the advanced capabilities of Google Cloud to offer Jio’s private 5G stack and other 5G-enabled solutions to both domestic and global users at scale,” he said.
Reliance is also partnering with Microsoft to expand the Azure ecosystem in India, and to develop an ecosystem of cloud-enabled business applications and solutions, especially for small and medium businesses. Reliance is also collaborating with Intel on technologies used in Jio’s cloud-scale data centres and 5G Edge locations, as well as in infrastructure for cutting-edge applications like Artificial Intelligence. “And we have well-established relationships with leading global network technology providers such as Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Cisco,” said Ambani.
Presently, Reliance Jio has 421 million mobile broadband subscribers in its 4G network. And they consume, on an average, nearly 20 GB of broadband data every month, nearly doubling their consumption from the year before. This fiscal also saw an acceleration in the adoption of JioFiber, Jio’s home broadband fiber solution. JioFiber is now the No 1 FTTX service provider in India, with over seven million connected premises.
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