Ahead of the much-anticipated 5G rollout, telecom major Reliance Jio has completed planning 5G coverage for 1,000 cities and conducted field trials of its home grown 5G telecom gears, per Reliance Industries annual report for 2021-22.
“Jio’s 5G coverage planning has been completed in top 1,000 cities based on targeted customer consumption and revenue potential using heat maps, 3D maps and ray tracing technology,” the report said.
The report said Jio has done active trials of 5G use cases ranging from AR/ VR, low-latency cloud gaming, network slicing and multi-tenancy for video delivery, TV streaming, connected hospitals and industrial applications.
In the recently concluded 5G auctions, the Mukesh Ambani-led telco was the top bidder, offering a cumulative bid of ₹88,078 crore for 24,740 MHz of spectrum across five bands. Jio also bought the premium 700MHz band, the sole telco to do so, which will enable it to deploy mature standalone 5G networks. Jio also has the premium spectrum in the 3.5GHz band, another core band for 5G.
Jio has also joined hands with University of Oulu in Finland — the leader of the world’s first major 6G research programme — to accelerate research and standardisation in 6G. Jio entered into a strategic partnership with Google for its Cloud Solutions to power the 5G experience of Indian enterprises as well as consumers
According to the Department of Telecom, 5G technology is expected to deliver 10 times better download speed than that of 4G and up to three times greater spectrum efficiency.
Jio, which became the market leader in providing fixed broadband solutions, continues to see fixed broadband as a significant greenfield opportunity and aspires to connect 50 million homes and 50 million MSMBs in India. Its expansive intra-city fiber network, execution abilities, superior customer experience together with its diverse suite and bundling of digital content, tech-enabled tools and solutions will be key differentiators.
