RJio ready to launch 5G services

Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJio), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), is ready to launch next generation 5G services in India, following allocation of spectrum by the Department of Communications (DoT). Further, Nasdaq-listed Radisys Corp, a company that was acquired by RIL in June last year, would be working with the industry to develop a 5G ecosystem in the country.

“There is no other operator in the country which is as ready as Rjio. We are the only company in the world with an Internet Protocol (IP) and all Voice over LTE (VoLTE) telecom network that can launch 5G services immediately,” RIL President Mathew Oommen told BusinessLine on the sideline of the Mobile World Congress 2019.

He, however, declined to provide a timeline for the launch, nor the spectrum frequency it would bid in case of auctions this year.

“Following the allocation of spectrum, a lot of testing and readying has to be conducted before we could launch the services,” he added.

The company has also sounded off authorities including licensor DoT and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) of its requirement of additional spectrum.

“We need additional spectrum, in addition to the 42-45 MHz we have,” he added.

Further, the company is also continuing to expand optical fibre deployments by adding “hundreds of thousands” of route kilometres. The telecom industry is expecting commercial launch of 5G services in India by end of 2020, that’s if spectrum allocation happens this year.

“We are already working on the disaggregation of network, which means that we will be vendor agnostic, we can add or remove any device making it a plug ‘n play network,” he said.

The 5G evolution, which the company is terming as the 2.0 transformation in the telecom sector, would be embarked upon “with or without” Reliance Communications (RCom) spectrum it was looking to acquire.