At the 44th AGM concluded earlier in the day, Reliance’s Chairman Mukesh Ambani shared some vital details about India’s 5G plan. He announced Jio’s collaboration with Google Cloud to power Jio 5G solutions and other services that the company provides.
Thanks to the partnership, Jio states that it will be able to leverage Google’s expertise in AI and machine learning, e-commerce, and demand forecasting offering. The company feels that this collaboration will help it provide faster and better internet connectivity to its user base in the country.
For the uninitiated, India’s leading telecom companies including Jio and Airtel have recently started 5G trials in Mumbai and Gurugram respectively. Both the companies, during these trials, were able to demonstrate download speeds in excess of 1Gbps.
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With the DoT announcing the roadmap for the commercial rollout of 5G in the country, it is expected that India may see 5G services rolling out sometime early next year.
Jio had previously announced, is using the indigenously developed solution for 5G technology. In today’s event, Ambani once again revealed that Jio’s team of developers and engineers has built a 5G solution that is fully cloud-native, software-defined, and digitally managed solution. He emphasized that this is a comprehensive and 100% home-grown solution.
Google on the other hand is already working closely with Jio and has helped develop a highly customized version of Android for the company's ambitious JioPhone Next – an ultra-affordable 4G phone aimed at offering feature phone users.
Additionally, Google has invested $4.5 billion in Jio Platforms to help build affordable 4G and 5G phones apart from co-develop an operating system powering these devices. It is being reported that the Jio-Google cloud partnership is among the biggest for the California-headquartered company globally.
In an interview, Thomas Kurian, Chief Executive Officer at Google Cloud said that theirs is “a broad partnership, it involves multiple pieces of Alphabet working together. Our own partnership spans multiple parts of Jio, not just the communications business... but also health, retail and other things. And it allows us to bring our technology to many consumers in India on a broad-scale basis as well as to many businesses that are served by Reliance."
Jio is confident that thanks to the future-proof hardware it has used during the introduction of 4G, it will be quicker and easier for the company to upgrade to 5G. Over the period, the company also plans to export Jio 5G solutions to other telecom operators across the world, obviously after it is successfully proven at a countrywide level in India.
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