NEW DELHI: Reliance Industries (RIL) Chairman Mukesh Ambani on Monday said Jio will launch its 5G services in multiple key cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai by Diwali and will connect every town, every taluka and every tehsil of the country by December 2023.
The company has earmarked a total investment of Rs 2 lakh crore to roll out 5G network in India. “By December 2023, which is less than 18 months from today, we will deliver Jio 5G to every town, every taluka, and every tehsil of our country,” said Ambani.
Talking about the modalities of its 5G services, the RIL Chairman said Jio 5G will be the world’s largest and most advanced 5G network. The other operators are deploying a version of 5G, called non-standalone 5G, which is essentially a 5G radio signal delivered over an existing 4G infrastructure.
In sharp contrast, he said Jio will deploy the latest version of 5G called Stand-Alone 5G, which has zero dependency on its 4G network. “With Stand-Alone 5G, Jio can deliver new and powerful services such as low latency connectivity, massive machine-to-machine communication, 5G voice, Edge computing and network slicing and metaverse,” he added.
In the just concluded 5G spectrum auction, Jio was the only telco that had bid for pricey 700 MHz low-band spectrum, which is essential for deep indoor coverage. The company is also working closely with all the leading global smartphone OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to speed up quick 5G deployment in the county and it has already partnered with Qualcomm.
Jio had also coming up with indigenously-developed 5G stacks, which is fully cloud native, software-managed, with support for even advanced features like Quantum Security. Amabahi said this is fully developed in-house by 2,000-plus young Jio engineers in the past three years. Currently, Jio has over 121 million mobile broadband subscribers on its 4G network, which consume on average nearly 20 GB of broadband data every month. “We are committed to make India the largest data-powered economy in the world, even ahead of China and the US,” he added.
Talking about the fixed broadband services, Ambani said with nearly 20 million connections, India is ranked lowly 138 in the world in fixed broadband adoption. Thus, Jio will help India to be among the top 10 global players in fixed broadband adoption.
Ambani said today Jio’s fibre optic network is of more than 11 lakh route kilometres in length, enough to go around the planet Earth, more than 27 times over the past year. The company said Reliance added 2.32 lakh jobs across all its businesses with Reliance Retail becoming one of the largest employers in the country.
Reliance Industries’ AGM: Laying the future road map
Some of the major announcements made by Reliance Industries’ Chairman Mukesh Ambani at the group’s annual general meeting on Monday
Petrochemical sector
Reliance will invest Rs 75,000 crore in the next five years. The company will build India’s first and one of the world’s largest Carbon Fibre plants at Hazira, Gujarat. Reliance will build one of the world’s largest single-train PTA plant of 3 MMTPA capacity at Dahej.
Telecom
The company announced JioAirfiber, a wifi hotspot that will allow consumers to access fiber-like speeds at homes and offices
Green hydrogen
RIL aims for transition to green hydrogen production by 2025. Has partnered Stiesdal for commercialisation of alkaline electrolyzer tech
Retail
Meta and Jio Platforms announced the launch of the first-ever end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp
Battery production
Reliance aims to start production of battery packs by 2023 and scale up to a fully integrated 5 GWh annual cell-to-pack manufacturing facility by 2024. It will further scale up to 50 GWh annual capacity by 2027.