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The 5G rollout continues to be the biggest focus at the Reliance Annual General Meeting (AGM). At this year’s edition, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) chairman, Mukesh Ambani, said that he is confident that Jio will be the “first one to launch full-fledged 5G services in India”.
Ambani also announced that Jio 5G standalone network had been deployed in data centres and trial sites in Navi Mumbai.
“Jio is uniquely positioned to quickly and seamlessly upgrade to 5G. To develop a 5G ecosystem, we are working with global partners to develop a range of 5G devices. Jio is not just working to make India 2G-mukt, but also 5G-yukt“, said Ambani.
Reliance also announced a 5G partnership between Google Cloud and Jio.
In a brief keynote address, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the partnership “will help more than a billion Indians connect to a faster internet, support businesses in digital transformation and lay the foundation for next phase of India’s digitization.”
Reliance will also shift its core retail businesses to Google Cloud’s infrastructure as part of this collaboration.
The Jio and Google partnership is part of the Google for India Digitisation Fund announced last year. Pichai had announced the company would invest Rs 75,000 crore ($10 billion) in India over the course of the next five to seven years.
At the AGM 2021, Mukesh Ambani also revealed that JioFiber acquired more than 2 million new premises over the past year. It now reaches more than 12 million homes and business premises in the “top 100 cities” in India.
Additionally, Ambani also revealed that Jio’s partnership with Google to develop an ‘ultra-affordable 4G smartphone’ has resulted in creating a new device named the JioPhone Next. The smartphone has been co-developed by Jio and Google and will feature an optimized version of Android OS.
