In the 44th AGM of Reliance Industries, Mukesh Ambani, MD & Chairman of Reliance Industries announced the collaboration that the company is entering in with Google to bring in 5G solutions.
Ambani said that the company is testing a full new commerce solution in partnership with Facebook, it has also operationalised the Jio-Azure Cloud Centres of 10-Mw capacity in partnership with Microsoft.
“Jio became the first operator out of China to cross 400 million subscribers in a single country. Jio is world’s 2nd largest data carrier handling monthly traffic of over 600 crore gigabytes a month. This is nearly a 45 percent growth in data consumption in the last year,” said Mukesh Ambani.
“India has about 300 million mobile users who are still unable to escape from the inefficient 2G services. Even a basic 4G smartphone remains unaffordable for these users. Therefore, an affordable 4G smartphone is essential”, he added.
Partnerships with Google & Microsoft
He further underlined the partnership between Reliance and Google for co-developing a feature-rich affordable smartphone that aimed at providing internet access to people.
“Google and the Jio teams have jointly developed a breakthrough smartphone that we are calling the ‘Jio Phone Next’.
Jio Phone Next is a fully-featured smartphone, supporting applications from Google and Jio along with the Android play store, which will allow users to have access to android apps.
The Jio Next phone is powered by the optimised version of the android optimising system, developed by Jio and Goggle especially for the Indian market,” added Ambani.
Ambani further added that Jio now has a 100 percent home-grown comprehensive 5G solution for standalone 5G network rollout in the country. Jio has successfully demonstrated speeds of over 1GB per second in trials using Jio 5G solutions.
He also added that Jio has received regulatory approval and trial spectrum for 5G field trials, and the company is testing 5G standalone network at its data centres across India and at trial sites in Mumbai, added a media report.
“We are confident of being the first to launch full-fledged 5G services. And because of our converged, future-proof architecture, Jio’s network is uniquely positioned to quickly and seamlessly upgrade from 4G to 5G.
To develop the end-to-end 5G ecosystem we are now working with leading global partners to develop a full range of 5G-capable devices.
The Jio 5G technology is well-positioned to create compelling applications for consumers and enterprises spanning Healthcare, Education, Entertainment, Retail and other key verticals of the economy,” Ambani said.
The Jio Next Phone will consist of the latest features like the Google Assistant, automatic read-aloud of screen text, language translation, smart camera with augmented reality filters, and more. It will be available in the market from September 10, 2021.
“We are taking our collaboration further with a new 5G partnership between Google cloud and Jio. It will help more than a billion Indians to connect to faster and better internet, support businesses in their digital transformation and help Jio build new services in sectors like health, education and others, laying out a foundation for the next phase of India’s digitisation,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google.
He further added that as a part of this partnership Reliance will shift its co-retail businesses to Google’s cloud infrastructure. They will be able to take advantage of Google’s AI and Machine learning, e-commerce and demand forecasting offerings. The offerings of Google cloud will help businesses to scale up and respond to customer demands.
“Jio will use Google cloud’s cutting edge solutions to power Jio’s 5G technology.” Added Ambani.
He further pointed out that with Microsoft the company has operationalised 10 MW capacity of Jio-Azure cloud data centres in two cities Jamnagar and Nagpur.
Jio is now onboarding the initial group of pilot customers and plans to expand the data centre capacity and service offerings to a growing number of SMEs and start-ups over the coming quarter.
