Reliance Industries CMD Mukesh Ambani Wednesday announced that the company’s telecom venture Jio has designed and developed from scratch, a complete indigenous 5G solution ready for deployment. The announcement, made at the company’s Annual General Meeting, will enable Jio to export 5G solutions to other telecom players globally, Ambani said.
Where does India stand on the deployment of 5G?
Companies, both telecom service providers and their equipment vendors, have completed lab trials of 5G network components but are yet to commence field trials, which were initially scheduled to happen last year. For the same, telecom companies are awaiting allocation of test spectrum from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). The service providers have already tied up with equipment makers like Nokia, Ericsson, etc for deploying their 5G networks.
What does Jio’s 5G solution comprise?
Jio is said to have a complete end-to-end 5G solution prepared by the company itself that is ready for deployment once the networks are in place. This solution can also be deployed by other telecom operators as a complete managed service. When Reliance announced investment by American chipmaker Qualcomm into Jio, it had said that the investment will deepen the ties between Qualcomm and Jio Platforms, “to support Jio Platforms on its journey to rollout advanced 5G infrastructure and services for Indian customers”. Additionally, with Google’s partnership, Jio plans to develop affordable smartphones using an optimised Android-based operating system. Experts peg that developing an Android 5G app ecosystem focused on emerging markets would also be an area of focus for Google from a medium-term perspective.
