Reliance Jio has come up with a new tactic to sustain its higher subscriber market share in the 5G era. Now the telecom service provider (TSP) is partnering up with the device makers to only enable support for Jio's 5G. This is of course happening for devices in the budget segment. OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) find it a little hard to offer 5G support at a lower price point. But Jio is somehow working with them to ensure super affordable phones can also get 5G support, but only of Jio's.
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This means that customers using these smartphones won't be able to use Airtel's 5G. Thus, they will have to stick with Jio. POCO C75 launched recently in India for Rs 7999. It is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 4s Gen 2 SoC, but it has been configured to only support Jio's 5G SA network.
The same thing happened with Redmi A4 5G. It is powered by the same chip - Snapdragon 4s Gen 2. This device also doesn't support Airtel's 5G. If many more such devices flood the affordable smartphone market, Airtel won't be able to tap into these 5G customers. While Airtel has always maintained that it doesn't focus on low-paying customers, it would be a lost opportunity for the company to get these users to pay more sometime in the future.
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Jio is very likely to partner with many more OEMs to bring their affordable 5G phones to the market with 5G SA support only. POCO C75 and Redmi A4 5G are the two devices in this list at the moment. Since Jio couldn't launch a 5G device that is super affordable, it is enabling that price point by working with the OEMs and chip makers who already have the scale to manage costs.
