Reliance subsidiary Jio, India’s leading phone operator, will invest $25 billion to deploy 5G nationwide. The company’s CEO, Mukesh Ambani, said on Monday 29 August that all cities in the country would be connect to the network at the end of 2023. Deployment will begin in October 2022. The project comes after India sidelined Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE in 2021, aiming to deploy their own services in the Indian subcontinent.
Reliance, India’s telecom leader
Reliance Jio is currently India’s leading telecommunications company with more than 421 million subscribers serve it, report TechCrunch. The company has already deployed 4G widely in the region and now intends to advance the democratization of 5G. According to its CEO, Indian companies are already able to connect more than 100 million households to its network and want to speed up deployment.
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To help with its ambitions, Jio has launched AirFiber, a next-generation 5G access point. With this technology, companies want to offer speeds as fast as fiber optics, with the advantage of not having to rely on wired networks. ” AirFiber is a simple, wireless one-device solution to have a Wi-Fi hotspot at home, connect to super high speed internet using true 5G “, explained Mukesh Ambani.
The telecommunications giant thinks it can make India one of the top ten countries with the best internet speeds. AirFiber devices developed by Reliance Jio will easily connect hundreds of millions of buildings at speeds of several gigabits per second.
Lots of foreign investment
The Reliance project is a logical continuation of the acquisition of the majority of the country’s 5G airwaves for $11.3 billion early August. This investment allows it to put itself ahead of all other Indian operators in terms of network access. If Reliance is able to make such an investment, it’s thanks in part to the contributions of Google and Meta that helped it raise funds.
By 2020, Facebook had invested $5.7 billion in Indian companies. In total, Reliance has raised more than $15.7 billion in the same year with other investments from Qualcomm, Intel, and General Atlantic. Google also contributed to the development affordable 5G smartphone which is at the heart of Reliance’s strategy to democratize the use of its network. The company is talking about expanding its partnership with chipmaker Qualcomm to develop other 5G solutions in the future.
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