The Chairman of Reliance Industries, Mukesh Ambani, said it would be ready for trials as soon as spectrum is available.
Jio Platforms is the Reliance Group’s digital arm and Ambani was speaking at Reliance Industries’ annual general meeting. Although there was little in the way of technical detail, he said that it would be ready for trials as soon as spectrum is available, and could be deployed in the field next year.
It is expected that India will allocate 5G spectrum for 5G next year: the auction will include almost 8300MHz of airwaves, including 5G spectrum in the 3.3 to 3.6GHz band and 4G spectrum in the 700MHz, 800MHz, 900MHz, 1800MHz, 2100MHz, 2300MHz and 2500MHz bands.
The auction was planned for 2020, but postponed by the government because apart from Jio Mobile, the Indian mobile sector in a perilous state. It was feared the reserve price was too high to attract bids.
Extensive capabilities
Working with more than 20 start-up firms, Jio Platforms has built “world-class” capabilities in technologies from 4G to 5G, cloud computing, devices and OS, big data, AI, augmented and virtual reality, blockchain, natural language understanding and computer vision, he added.
Ambani continued, “Using these technologies, we can create compelling solutions across multiple industry verticals like media, financial services, new commerce, education, healthcare, agriculture, smart cities, smart manufacturing & smart mobility”.
Jio Platforms is designed to develop technology and intellectual property, he stated: “We can demonstrate transformative power of technology across multiple ecosystems first in India, and then rest of world.
Three-year plan
The plan for the next three years is for Jio to connect half a billion mobile customers, a billion smart sensors and 50 million home and business establishments.
Ambani said, “We have fully kickstarted five accelerators of growth of digital connectivity: mobile broadband, JioFiber, Jio’s enterprise broadband, broadband for SMEs, and Jio’s NB-IoT.”