Jio arms itself with own cutting-edge tech, telecom could be in for another reset

Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Jio, India’s top mobile operator by subscribers, now reportedly has 5G tech of its own. The inhouse tech could help Jio race further ahead of its rivals that are already run ragged by its hugely disruptive pricing game.

Till now, Jio has been depending upon 4G voice technology supplied by Oracle and Nokia. According to a company exec, Jio has already replaced Orclae and Nokia techs with its own in an effort to cut reliance on foreign third-party suppliers.

This revelation comes just weeks after Mukesh Ambani told a visiting Donald Trump that Jio was the only telecom company that did not use any Chinese component.

Jio has now developed everything end-to-end around 5G technology, ET was told by a person privy to the development. This may be the first time in the world a mobile phone company has developed such in-house technology to replace external equipment providers.

“We are more scalable than these vendors and are fully automated since we have our own cloud-native platform. In 5G, we will totally be self-sufficient,” the executive said. Jio has designed its own hardware for the 5G technology, which could be made in India once 5G trials are successful. “We can give the design, layouts and board support packages to third-party manufacturers to have our gear made,” the executive said.

With its end-to-end 5G technology, Jio would be able to use it for security and surveillance using drones, industrial internet of things and digitisation in the agriculture sector. “Broadband and voice will be the baseline of our technology,” the executive added.

To strengthen its position in 5G and IoT, the Jio’s parent company Reliance Industries merged subsidiary Rancore Technologies, a developer of 4G software, with the operator in 2017 and acquired US-based software company Radisys in 2018.