Have deployed a standalone 5G network to leapfrog ahead: Reliance Jio

After disrupting the consumer telecommunications market with its 4G networks since 2016, Reliance Jio is now all set to give tough competition to its competitors with its 5G enterprise solutions. With the rollout of the 5G telecom services yesterday, the company is ready to lure nearly 5 million Indian enterprises with 5G-enabled NAAS on a standalone basis, a senior company executive said.

NAAS or Network-as-a-service that allows businesses and individuals to utilise high-speed networks for storing data on a real-time basis, is expected to be a game changer with 5G technology. This would allow enterprises as well as retail consumers, to replace their storage devices with 5G-enabled NAAS as high-speed data uplinking and downlinking would make physical storage such as hard disc drives redundant. This has opened up a new avenue for business for telecom, including Reliance Jio, which was earlier not feasible under the 4th generation (4G) telecom services.

According to Radhey Sarda, Senior Vice-President & Head of Advanced Technologies at Reliance Jio, the company has aggressively prepared for 5G NAAS over the last few years and is now ready to deploy it.

“At Jio, we have taken leapfrog approach and we have decided to deploy a pure standalone carrier aggregation enabled network. The models that NASS relies on, like network slicing or private 5G network - they are aligned with standalone 5G. Therefore, we are ready to deploy in association with our innovation and ecosystem partners. We may have started a little late but now two-three years ahead of leading markets globally,” he said at India Mobile Congress today.

According to him, the size of the market for NAAS-enabled 5G enterprise solutions is huge in India. Currently, there are 1,200-odd large enterprises, 32,000 medium, 300,000 small and some 4.5 million micro-enterprises, which will be using these services in future.

While the incremental size of the 5G NAAS-enabled market would be US$ 2 billion in five years in India, said Sarda. “There are three key aspects of 5G in terms of driving the NAAS. The first is through connectivity, second is platform and third is application”.