Jio's self-built 5G stack draws global attention

Time of India

2 days ago

A senior executive of
Reliance Industries
said the self-developed end-to-end 5G stack of
Reliance Jio
, the conglomerate's telecom arm, is gaining recognition globally and is a potential monetisable opportunity.
'It (Jio) is one of the leading deep tech companies in India with enormous amounts of innovation and technology development that we have done over the years,' Anshuman Thakur, senior vice president, Reliance Industries, said at the company's earnings call on Friday.
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Reliance Jio is an unlisted subsidiary of Jio Platforms, which holds Reliance Industries' telecom and digital businesses.
'Today this technology, this tech stack, the entire value chain, the whole software, hardware stack is only available with us and has been deployed at scale,' Thakur said. 'All the global operators are looking at us to see how we have done this so successfully. And then a whole bunch of initiatives on AI.'
The latest addition to the telecom tech stack is the multi-point
UBR technology
for home connections, which global telcos have tried to replicate but failed, he said.
UBR enables multiple home connections through a single 5G cell site targeting 50%-60% homes within a micro-cluster using a single transmission tower, bringing down deployment costs.
'We are the first to deploy UBR for UBR-based connectivity at scale. This is a technology that operators worldwide have tried to work on and have not had much success,' he said.
UBR is the innovation child of
Mimosa Networks
, the US-based communications equipment maker which Jio Platforms acquired for $60 million through its wholly owned subsidiary Radisys Corporation in August 2023.
Majority of Jio's UBR equipment are manufactured by US-based Sanmina Corporation, which has a joint venture with Reliance Industries in India.
During the June quarter, Jio crossed the milestone of 20 million home connections, 7.4 million of which were AirFiber FWA (fixed wireless access) connections scaled with UBR tech. The telco now has 82% market share in 5G FWA connections in India.
Analysts are bullish on Jio's strong customer additions and cost benefits from technology ownership after Q1 and have raised Jio's enterprise valuation.
'Jio's 5G tech stack, core, software, hardware and BSS/OSS are all in-house and proprietary,' brokerage firm
IIFL Securities
said in a report. 'This enables quicker revenue ramp-up due to lower dependence of vendors, lower costs due to licence fee savings, customisation/scale-up of configuration based on requirements, and potential monetisation by selling to global telcos.'
IIFL has raised Jio's valuation to $134.2 billion (Rs11.2 lakh crore) from $133.9 billion it had said earlier.
Equity research firm Jefferies also raised its revenue estimates by 1-4% to factor in the changes to subscriber assumptions and lower access/network costs.
'We believe RJio remains well-placed to deliver 18%/22% CAGR in revenues/EBITDA over FY25-28, given rising tariffs in mobile and scaleup of
home broadband business
. We raise our EV (enterprise valuation) for Jio to US $146 billion (Rs 12.19 lakh crore) on the EBITDA upgrade and roll-over to Jun-27,' Jefferies said in a report.
Jio also holds the highest number of patents on 6G.
Jio Cloud
, launched last year, offering 100GB free cloud storage, now has 35 million consumers, Thakur said during the call.
On Monday, rival telecom operator
Bharti Airtel
's shares ended 0.4% higher on the BSE at Rs 1,908.75, giving it a market cap of more than Rs 10.88 lakh crore.