Reliance Jio is the number one telecom operator of India purely because of its forward-thinking and amazing execution of the plans. The telco revolutionised the way people connected in India by bringing in the world’s most affordable 4G plans and providing PAN-India network coverage in no time. Now, Jio is looking to do the same with 5G in India. But this time, Jio will go a step further and will not rely on foreign companies for the network equipment.
For rolling out 4G networks, Reliance Jio took a lot of help from Samsung. However, with 5G, Jio has been vocal about how much it wants to develop indigenous products and manufacture all of them within the boundaries of the country to make India ‘self-reliant’.
Reliance Jio Will Build 5G Equipment in India With a Global Technology Giant
Reliance Jio’s vision is to reduce India’s dependency on foreign companies for sourcing equipment for network rollout. The company has already built an end-to-end 5G stack which includes 5G radio and core network solutions.
A few days back, news came to the surface that Jio is working with one of its investors namely Qualcomm to manufacture 5G equipment locally in India. Qualcomm has all the experience a company can have in producing equipment. Being an investor in the Jio Platforms, the company will be helping Jio with local manufacturing of the 5G equipment.
With this move, Jio will save a ton of costs on equipment because manufacturing on its own will allow the company to take the benefit of the economy of scale. Further, the company can control the production as per its demand.
On top of this, it is expected that Jio will also be manufacturing solutions and equipment for other operators within the country and outside India as well. This will result in India importing a little lesser and exporting more.
For the unaware, Reliance Jio had earlier partnered with Qualcomm to develop and test Virtualised RAN (vRAN) with open and interoperable interface compliant architecture based 5G solutions. Both the companies were able to hit a milestone of achieving over 1 Gbps of speed on the Jio 5GNR solution.
Reliance Jio Testing 5G
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has allocated dedicated spectrum for the telcos to conduct their 5G trials. For conducting the tests, Reliance Jio has chosen to take the help of Samsung which already has had a long partnership with the company in the past.
Reliance Jio is expected to announce more about its 5G plans later this month at the RIL’s AGM.
