Reliance Jio plans to deploy a $25 billion 5G Stand Alone (SA) network across India to help power the country’s effort to achieve developed status, company Chairman Mukesh Ambani announced yesterday at Reliance Industries’ 45th annual general meeting. The network, which is scheduled for completion by the end of 2023, will use spectrum acquired at auction for $11 billion early in August.
Reliance Jio plans to build on the success that India achieved with 4G wireless, which saw mobile broadband data double to 29 gigabits in the last year, but Ambani said Reliance Jio will use the 5G rollout to make up for a lack of fixed wireless access in the country.
“India is ranked a lowly 138th in the world in fixed broadband adoption,” Ambani said. “Unlike in leading nations, the vast majority of our homes, offices and businesses have been deprived of the power of fixed broadband and ubiquitous indoor WiFi and consequently, the power of modern digital tools. This has to change and change fast. Jio will change this. We will enable India to be among the top 10 globally in fixed broadband adoption.”
Using an cloud-native, software-defined end-to-end 5G stack, which was developed by 2,000 Indian engineers over three years, Reliance Jio has big plans to help with the effort launched by Prime Minister Narenda Modi to transform India into a developed nation by the year 2047.
“Within the next generation, India is set to achieve more than all the post independent generations have collectively achieved so far,” Ambani said. “And Reliance Jio is set to make a far greater contribution to India’s prosperity and progress than we have done so far.”
Reliance Jio will use the expanded 5G broadband availability to further stimulate the adoption of connected intelligent solutions. Specifically, it plans to connect more than 100 million homes and provide digital experiences and smart home solutions. It also plans to empower tens of millions of small merchants with “cutting edge plug-and-play solutions” delivered from the cloud.
“We can provide thousands of medium-sized businesses with the same digital capabilities that were historically available only to larger companies,” Ambani said. “We can accelerate the digital transformation of tens of thousands of our large enterprises and make them globally competitive. We can launch billions of smart sensors with connected intelligence that can power the Internet of Things and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
To speed the move to a high-speed wireless network India, Reliance Jio will skip the 5G Non Standalone stage, which depended on the 4G network, and go straight to 5G SA. “We can build on the success of Jio 4G by introducing an even more advanced version of our mobile broadband service to accelerate the rollout of high quality, highly affordable fixed broadband services to hundreds of millions of locations,” Ambani said.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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