Jio 5G launch by Diwali: RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani

Reliance Industries chairman on Monday said that the company will launch Jio 5G in India's major cities by Diwali 2022.

"Within the next two months, that is by Diwali of 2022, we will launch Jio 5G across multiple key cities including the metro cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata," Ambani says at RIL's annual general meeting.

The oil-to-telecom conglomerate plans to roll-out its 5G service throughout the country by December 2023.

"We will use our wireless and wireline assets to blanket blanket 3.3 million square kilometres of India's landmass with fibre quality broadband," says Ambani.

In order to build a pan-India 5G network, the company has committed an investment of ₹2 lakh crore.

Calling Jio 5G the world's largest and most advanced network, Ambani says most operators are deploying a version of 5G, called non-standalone 5G, which is essentially a 5G radio signal delivered over an existing 4G infrastructure.

This approach, Ambani says, is a hasty way to nominally claim a 5G launch, but it won't deliver the breakthrough improvements in performance and capability possible with 5G.

In sharp contrast, Jio will deploy the latest version of 5G, called Stand-Alone 5G, which has zero dependency on Jio's 4G network, says Ambani. "With Stand-Alone 5G, Jio can deliver new and powerful services such as low latency connectivity, massive machine-to-machine communication, 5G voice, Edge computing and network slicing, and metaverse."

"Jio 5G will be True 5G in every sense, and I believe that India deserves nothing less than True 5G. At the recent auction conducted by the Department of Telecommunications, we have acquired the largest and the most appropriate mix of wireless spectrum for 5G. This gives Jio 5G a distinct competitive advantage over other operators," says Ambani, adding that Reliance is committed to make India the largest data-powered economy in the world, beating China and the United States.

In addition to the 3500 MHz mid-band which is globally earmarked for 5G, and the 26 GHz millimetre-wave band for ultra-high capacity, only Jio has the 700 MHz low-band spectrum which is essential for deep indoor coverage, explains Ambani at the company's 45th annual general meeting.

"With Jio 5G, we will connect every-one, every-place and every-thing with the highest quality and most affordable data. In addition to meeting India's needs, we are confident of offering digital solutions to global markets," the RIL chairman says at the AGM. "We have indigenously developed end-to-end 5G stack which is cloud native, software defined, digitally managed, with support for advanced features like quantum security."

Over the past year, Reliance Jio has further consolidated its position as India’s top digital service provider. "Today, we have 421 million mobile broadband subscribers on our 4G network and they consume, on an average, around 20 GB of data every month," says Ambani.

Jio's pan-India fibre-optic network is over 11 lakh kilometres in length – enough to go around planet Earth 27 times, Ambani adds.

"JioFiber is now the number one FTTX service provider in India, with over 7 million connected premises – a feat achieved in less than two years despite COVID-19 lockdowns," says Ambani.

"True 5G delivers breakthrough increases in broadband speed and drastically lowers latency. We don't get 1 Gbps even on many of the fixed broadband networks in our country," says Reliance Jio chairman Akash Ambani while speaking on the company's 5G launch by Diwali.