Reliance Jio is the only Indian telecom operator that has developed an end-to-end core for 5G. In fact, Jio also announced that it had locally developed radios as well to go with the core solutions. But earlier this year, Jio gave multiple contracts to vendors, including Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia, for helping with the 5G rollout by providing radios. But a fresh development suggests that now Jio is going to use a higher proportion of locally developed radios. For Jio, Sanmina Corporation will be manufacturing radios that can work well with the frequencies in the 700 MHz and 3300 MHz bands. Jio is the only Indian telco that is deploying sub-GHz spectrum for 5G over SA (standalone) infrastructure.
RIL Formed JV with Sanmina Corporation to Manufacture 4G and 5G Radios Locally
According to an ET report, Jio is already utilising the homegrown radios on its networks, but the quantity or proportion is less. But as local manufacturing picks up, Jio will start deploying more local radios on its 5G network. A RIL (Reliance Industries Limited) unit - Reliance Strategic Business Ventures (RSBVL) and Sanmina Corporation had last month announced a joint venture (JV) transaction. The JV between the companies would mainly look to manufacture 4G and 5G radios. These radios will be both for the Indian as well as overseas markets.
Sanmina has also been selected by the government to be included in the PLI (Production Linked Incentive) scheme for telecom equipment production. Jio will be looking to export its 5G solutions to other nations as well. The telco has developed its own 5G core network, an end-to-end 5G stack consisting of radio, cloud infrastructure deployment as well as cloud-native operation support system (OSS) platforms. Jio has already deployed the 5G stack in the offices of RIL, and it is working pretty well.
As per the report, Jio is added around 2500 new 5G sites per week, and in the coming three to four months, the telco will look to deploy around 5000 new 5G sites per week. Bharti Airtel is adding 1200 new 5G sites per week for now. Even Airtel would increase it in the coming months.
