Reliance Jio becomes 1st company to launch 5G in Delhi-NCR

Reliance Jio Infocomm, the telecom arm of Reliance Industries, became the first company to launch 5G across the Delhi- NCR, the company notified in a regulatory filing on Friday. The 5G network will be available across Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Ghaziabad, and Faridabad. The development comes on the heels of the telecom major’s plans for a countrywide rollout of 5G by the end of 2023, with an investment of ₹2 lakh crore. 

According to the regulatory filing, the network, which the company terms as ‘True 5G’, will be available across all important localities and areas including, but not limited to most residential areas, hospitals, educational institutions, government buildings, high streets, malls & markets, high footfall areas such as tourist spots and hotels, tech-parks, roads, highways and metros. The Jio 5G network is touted to provide unlimited data at up to 1Gbps+ speeds. 

“Covering the majority of the National Capital and NCR region is a matter of pride for us. Jio is expanding its True 5G reach at a rapid pace and has already rolled out a large portion of the planned True-5G network in this area. It is the only operator to be present across the entire Delhi-NCR region with True-5G services.,” a Jio spokesperson says.

“The reason Jio engineers are working round the clock to deliver True-5G to every Indian is because of the transformational power of this technology and the exponential benefit it can bring to every citizen,” the spokesperson says. 

Last week, the telecom major launched 5G across Hyderabad and Bengaluru. In October, the company selected four cities namely Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Varanasi, to launch beta trials for 5G users with up to 1Gbps plus speed. 

In order to expand its 5G footprint across the country, Jio has also signed contracts with Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson and Finnish telecommunications firm Nokia for the pan-India rollout of 5G. 

In the company’s 45th annual general meeting, Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries, said that with the launch of the 5G network, the oil-to-telecom conglomerate will use wireless and wireline assets to blanket 3.3 million square kilometres of India’s landmass with fibre quality broadband.

Ambani said, “We have indigenously developed an end-to-end 5G stack which is cloud-native, software-defined, digitally managed, with support for advanced features like quantum security."

In the 5G network auction, which was held in August, Jio emerged as the top bidder to acquire spectrum in the 700MHz, 800MHz, 1800MHz, 3300MHz, and 26GHz bands worth ₹88,078 crore. Notably, Jio is the only telecom operator to have acquired the coveted 700 MHz low-band spectrum which is essential for deep indoor coverage. 

Moreover, last month, the company dethroned BSNL to become India’s top landline operator, having a user base of 71.3 lakh. The company has a market share of 28.31% in the domestic telecom market.