Reliance Jio Infocomm, the country’s only pan-India license holder of broadband wireless spectrum, is deploying 300 small cells per day and plans to increase it to 1,700 small cells in order to meet its long-term goals, according to the company’s Senior VP of Wireless networks, Tareq Amin.
RCR Wireless reported that Jio’s network plans include the deployment of 150,000 small cell, which is largest such deployment in the world. “To meet the lofty targets, Jio created its own automated workflow that allows every employee to access small cell data from a tablet,” the report added.
Small cells not only improve building coverage and capacity but positively impact the capacity of the outdoor macro network. Due to the low power requirement these solutions are environment friendly and have least radiation. These equipments also help telcos save and utilise its biggest asset ‘Spectrum’.
Jio, a Mukesh Ambani-owned company, last year acquired a stake in Israeli company Airspan, which has been providing small cells to the telco. Amin, as per the report, said that there were a plenty of small cells in the company’s warehouses ready to be deployed, even as the company faces issues such as power stability that are hindering the goals from being met.
Jio’s network strategy also includes more than 100,000 macro sites, 500,000+ Wi-Fi access points and more than 234,000 Kilometres of fiber to be deployed in the next three years. Amin also said that Jio is targeting to more LTE subscribers than all of the U.S. telcos combined in the next two years.
A report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch recently said that Jio will be leading the country’s 4G LTE market with 40 percent market share by 2019-2020, while the share of Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular will reach 60 percent by 2019-20, up from 53 percent in 2016-17,
