Can 5G put India on the map of the tech universe?
On the 15th of July 2020, Google, while confirming its $4.5 Billion investment for a 7.73% stake in Reliance India subsidiary — Jio-Platforms released the following statement through its blog -
Google and Jio Platforms entered into a commercial agreement to jointly develop an entry-level affordable smartphone with optimizations to the Android operating system and the Play Store. Together we are excited to rethink, from the ground up, how millions of users in India can become owners of smartphones.
& this could not have come at a better time. The Indian Economy and major industries while on one hand were struggling in the midst of a pandemic, Jio was ramping up its cash flow with new partnership deals with the likes of Facebook & Google. The Jio-Google partnership can set the base for fantastic opportunities for both at the same time benefiting the colossal customer base of India. With smartphone penetration still low in rural areas, the company has HUGE potential to take over a vast chunk of the market share with the help of Jio.
Also, with Facebook too entering into a partnership with Jio back in April 2020 to foray into the e-commerce sector, this can mean only one thing for the company.
Unparallel growth prospects through Knowledge transfer. But only,
IF they use it wisely.
Reliance Jio’s first online-only Annual General Meeting(AGM) was filled with pleasant surprises and in the end, got me thinking that it has left the company with a massive opportunity to put India on the map of the tech universe.
For a long time now, India has been a major player in the IT market; but not as a technology provider. The country churns out software engineers at the rate of thousands every year to be recruited in service-based companies, Id est. the companies who take outsourced work from some of the biggest product-based companies for various kinds of support requirements.
In short as a country, we provide (or are able to) provide services, because our labour is cheap and their skill levels are just perfect. Although being known all over for providing great & cost-effective services, an area we currently lack is global tech solutions. Talking about the Indian tech industry, we have always majorly relied on the availability of outsourced work from outside,
But this can change only if Jio acts proactively
In the AGM, Mr Mukesh Ambani announced that Jio will be ready for the field deployment of 5G till the end of 2021 or the start of 2022. Now we already know what impact 5G can have on our lives. Apart from the lightning-fast data speeds, 5G is expected to have latency ten times less than that observed in 4G, this means we will be able to perform many remote actions in real-time like controlling the Heaters/ACs before we reach our home to give us warmth, control logistics & modes of transports like Cars. All this points out to you know what — the IoT. All the smart appliances inter-connected and keeping track of our daily routine, health and tasks in real-time.
Since the start of the US-China trade war in 2019, the USA had gone ahead and took the step of banning the Chinese giant Huawei’s 5G Hardware network over security concerns. India which had already banned several Chinese apps in its country followed suit accompanied by some of the European countries after that.
With China in a fix for options, it had to resort to challenging these decisions in the various international courts & bodies around the world. But with the second wave of the Covid strain hitting EU nations and recently India; the judgements of these claims is set to take time. Time, which Jio can use to move ahead to manufacture and deploy 5g at least in India. If the deployments are cost-effective to an event that allows Jio to export this technology to developed nations, I think Jio can help put India on the map, at the same time utilising the huge resource pool of software engineers for its disposal to keep the products competitive.
If Jio can ramp up its 5G deployment plans and come with its line of cost-effective 5G hardware to rival the other Asian companies and it can do wonders for the country only this time as a major product based one.
