Jio starts selling homegrown 5G tech, raises concern about open RAN in India

Jio's senior vice president talks about selling its indigenously developed 5G solution in the global market, 5G monetization and his thoughts on deploying open RAN in India.

Gagandeep Kaur, Contributing Editor

October 17, 2024

4 Min Read
erson holding smartphone with logo of Reliance Jio on screen in front of website
(Source: Timon Schneider/Alamy Stock Photo)

India's largest service provider, Reliance Jio, has started selling its indigenous 5G stack in the international market.

"Yes, we are already talking to global players, and you should hear something soon," said Aayush Bhatnagar, senior vice president at Reliance Jio, on the sidelines of the ongoing India Mobile Congress 2024, one of the largest telecom events in Asia.

The company has developed its own 5G stack, which it claims to have deployed in its 5G network, and is now looking to sell it in the global market. It is possible that Jio might be looking at the African market – earlier this year, it was revealed that Reliance Industries' Radisys is part of Next Gen InfraCo (NGIC), which plans to set up a 5G network in Ghana. Radisys is a wholly owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries, the parent company of Reliance Jio.

The company has set up one of the world's largest 5G networks with around 1.1 million 5G cells. "We provide 95% coverage across the nation. So 1.1 million 5G cells, both TDD [time division duplex] and FDD [frequency division duplex], which we have deployed and commercialized. This is a mix of both third-party radios and indigenous radios," elaborates Bhatnagar. Jio has 480 million subscribers, which includes 148 million 5G subscribers.

Jio downbeat on open RAN in India

Until recently, Jio was thought to be developing an open RAN solution for the global market. However, the service provider is emphatic that open RAN is unlikely to work in India.

"If you look at the Indian demography, the intra-city fiber cuts are very high. So, if you split the [network] functions and you have fiber backhaul, then you will struggle in India. Probably in the European markets where the intra-city fiber cuts are not so high, it [open RAN] makes sense," elaborates Bhatnagar.

Intra-city fiber is especially prone to being cut in India due to digging for development projects, vandalism or even bad weather.

This comes close to the recent 4G expansion and 5G deployment deals announced by Vodafone Idea. The company has awarded deals worth $3.6 billion to Ericsson, Samsung and Nokia and completely ignored open RAN. This was surprising since it had conducted an open RAN trial with Mavenir, one of the prominent global open RAN vendors. Similarly, Jio and Bharti Airtel, India's second-largest service provider, have not awarded any open RAN deals in the first phase of 5G deals two years back.

The world's second-largest telecom market giving the cold shoulder to open RAN is definitely likely to impact the open RAN vendors.

Regarding 5G monetization

The company plans to focus on both retail consumer as well as the enterprise segment for 5G monetization. It is gung-ho about the fixed wireless access (FWA) 5G use case. In the recently released reports, it claims to have emerged as the fastest-growing fixed wireless operator globally with over 2.8 million connections to JioAirFiber (its FWA offering).

"We have 3 million homes today. If you look at T-Mobile, it took them four and a half years to reach 4 million. And we have crossed 3 million homes within a year. So you can see the difference between the demand in developed markets versus the Indian market," says Bhatnagar.

"Scaling up distribution, continuous optimization of the onboarding process, and technology edge would enable Jio to achieve the target of connecting 100 million homes in India at record speed," Jio said in its press note announcing the results for the quarter ending September 30, 2024.

The results show Jio's 5G customers are now contributing around 34% of wireless data traffic on its network. In addition, per capita data consumption has increased to 31GB per month with a higher mix of 5G and home users. The company also recorded a 7.4% year-on-year increase in its average revenue per user (ARPU) to touch 195 Indian rupees (US$2.32).

The service provider is also looking to contribute to the ongoing process of setting 6G standards. "We are now contributing to 3GPP Release 19 and later on Release 20, both on the 6G and also on the 6G core and all the features which are AI driven. We believe AI and 6G are two sides of the same coin," says Bhatnagar.

Commenting on the lessons learned from setting up one of the world's largest 5G network, Bhatnagar said: "One of the biggest learnings was the device ecosystem, which took its own time to evolve. However, it is still better than 4G… there was more struggle in 4G. The handset market for 2G and 3G was completely on circuit switch, so it took a long time, even for the biggest handset vendors, to evolve into all IP. There have been hiccups in the transition from 4G to 5G, but not that much. Now, most of the new devices are 5G-enabled in India."

Update: Following the publication of this story, Aayush Bhatnagar issued a LinkedIn response indicating Jio has concerns about open RAN but has not ruled out the deployment of it in India. The headline has been changed and the story updated to reflect those comments.

His statement on LinkedIn reads: "The issue of increased frequency of intra-city fiber cuts in Indian cities demands additional technical considerations [in] India, than say in Europe, in how to choose a mix of classical D-RAN, C-RAN or new Hybrid and Distributed topologies that open interfaces can facilitate."

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About the Author

Gagandeep Kaur

Contributing Editor

With more than a decade of experience, Gagandeep Kaur Sodhi has worked for the most prominent Indian communications industry publications including Dataquest, Business Standard, The Times of India, and Voice&Data, as well as for Light Reading. Delhi-based Kaur, who has knowledge of and covers a broad range of telecom industry developments, regularly interacts with the senior management of companies in India's telecom sector and has been directly responsible for delegate and speaker acquisition for prominent events such as Mobile Broadband Summit, 4G World India, and Next Generation Packet Transport Network.

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