Jio Export 5G technology to West Asia, Europe & Southeast Asian countries

Jio Targets West Asia, Eastern Europe For Indigenous 5G Solution:

Jio is reportedly planning to take its indigenous 5G solution to West Asia, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, after scaling and testing the technology in India

Last month, the company approached the Department of Telecommunications to conduct field trials of its 5G technology in a few cities

The company has claimed that its 5G solution is completely homegrown

Jio Platforms, the parent of Reliance Jio Infocomm, may target West Asia, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asian regions for its self-developed 5G technology after it tests and scales it up in India, even as it looks to form partnerships to locally manufacture equipment, said company executives and analysts.

It will soon start discussions with various local players in the domain of system integration and local manufacturing of its 5G gear, said a senior company executive.

“Electronic manufacturing needs to be done through specialised firms, whether it is Jio or any other provider. This will be done in India,” the executive said on condition of anonymity, adding that discussions were underway with various companies for partnerships.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a recent report that Jio may depend on its 4G gear partner Samsung so that its 5G equipment is backward compatible. “If Samsung starts assembling/manufacturing 5G massive MIMO/RU in India (in its handset factory), then Jio’s entire 5G stack in theory would be ‘Made in India’,” said the report.

The executive cited earlier said Jio will be focusing on markets which are not advanced in terms of telecom networks and may take some time to migrate to 5G.

“The potential targets for Jio could be markets which will be slightly late in deploying 5G – countries in Middle East, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia,” said Ashwinder Sethi, principal at Analysys Mason.

However, the Bank of America Merrill Lynch report said “offering ‘managing services’ to other international telcos is entirely a different proposition”, expressing doubts over Jio’s export potential. “It remains unclear to us why other telcos would open their networks and allow another telco to manage their networks,” it said.

With 5G, telecom networks are becoming more software-centric and cloud-native, allowing for de-coupling of software and hardware. Jio is making a strong push towards deploying its own end-to-end 5G software solution, with focus on OpenRAN and virtualisation, to reduce reliance on traditional telecom vendors.

OpenRAN enables hardware and software to be dis-aggregated, unlike conventional radio gears, allowing technology products from different suppliers to co-exist with the various software providers. This move would also help telcos cut network-related costs and bring more customisation as they prepare for 5G, said experts.

Analysts said Jio is likely to embrace OpenRAN techniques or possibly even Cloud-RAN as an architecture. This could reduce Jio’s network roll-out costs by 10-15% compared with using traditional infrastructure providers, UBS said in a report.

Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, said Jio is leaning towards OpenRAN technology to deploy a cost-efficient, no vendor lock-in 5G network and will ideally need to work with partners to integrate the system completely in-house.

“Similar to Rakuten, Jio will look to sell the technologies in the form of either an end-to-end platform it will build or in a modular way to the other operators globally. For example, the software piece would come from Radisys or Jio and do the design and integration as per the operators’ needs,” said Shah.

Further, the bigger opportunity for Jio lies with the emergence of private 5G networks and selling the Jio network platform & integration services to companies across different verticals looking to deploy their own 5G networks and don’t want to rely on integrating everything from RAN to Core by themselves, Shah added.

Rakuten has developed Rakuten Mobile Platform (RMP), which is essentially packaging its mobile network strategy into a product, which is a “containerised, cloud platform”. The Japanese e-commerce firm’s RMP comprises its software powering its 4G and 5G radio to the OSS (operations support systems) and BSS (business support systems) through partners.

Bernstein said in a recent note that Indian IT services players could become Jio’s partners as they have capabilities in 5G since they have worked with global telcos.

“Telecom vertical is 15-40% of overall revenues. Tech Mahindra has a stake in Altiostar which is helping Rakuten to deploy its 5G network in Japan,” said Bernstein.