Reliance Jio was the highest bidder at the recently concluded spectrum auction and grabbed the premium 700MHz band, which is claimed to provide better coverage using lesser towers. Post the auction, newly appointed Jio Chairman Akash Ambani also announced that the company would celebrate the ‘Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav’ with the 5G rollout, hinting at an imminent launch of services across the country in August itself.
Jio 5G rollout in India
The Indian government received 5G spectrum auction bids totalling Rs 1.5 lakh crore, or 71 percent of the total 5G spectrum that was available to bid. Reliance Jio, as expected, was the top spender in the 5G spectrum auction. The telco paid Rs 88,078 crore for buying rights to a total of 24,740MHz 5G spectrum. It now has access to spectrum in the 700MHz, 800MHz, 1,800MHz, 3,300MHz, and 26GHz bands.
In the last month’s quarterly results call, RIL President Kiran Thomas stated that the telco had chosen nine cities for the initial deployment. These include Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Jamnagar, Hyderabad, and Lucknow among others. Another reason to choose these cities was the extensive 5G trials that were conducted there. On top of this, Jio’s 5G services will be based on the company’s indigenous 5G stack.
To speed up research and standardisation in 6G, Jio has also partnered with the University of Oulu in Finland, which is in charge of the first significant 6G research programme in the world.
The Department of Telecom estimates that 5G technology will offer download speeds that are ten times faster than those of 4G, but these speed improvements will come at an additional cost. Industry experts predict that 5G data plans would cost at least 30 percent more than current 4G data plans.
Meanwhile, Airtel has also revealed the roadmap of its 5G services in the country, details of which can be read here.
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