For the uninitiated, Google picked up a 7.7 percent stake in Jio Platforms earlier last year. The investment came from the Mountain View giant’s $10 billion (or Rs. 75,000) Google for India Digitization Fund. Both the tech giants then started working on a low-cost 4G Android phone to meet the needs of the Indian masses. And well, JioPhone Next is a result of this combined effort. Jio Platforms and Google are now further expanding this partnership. This will see the Indian telecom giant rely on “a complete end-to-end cloud offering for fully automated lifecycle management of Jio’s 5G network and services” from Google Cloud. The telco is already in the process of conducting 5G network trials in Navi Mumbai and data centers across India. Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, during the AGM, reiterated that Jio 5G has achieved over 1Gbps download speeds with the use of indigenously-developed hardware. Thanks to the recent regulatory approvals and 5G spectrum trials, Ambani claimed that he’s confident in Jio being the first to roll out 5G network services in India.
Besides, both Jio and Google will also collaborate to make available “a portfolio of 5G edge computing solutions” to industry partners. The telco will be able to leverage Google’s AI/ ML capabilities and other cloud solutions to scale its business as per customer’s needs. The Jio 5G and Google Cloud partnership “will help more than a billion Indians connect to a faster and better internet, support businesses in their digital transformation, and help Jio build new services in sectors like health, education, and more,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in an official blog post. So yeah, Google Cloud will now power most of Reliance Jio’s infrastructure backend and enable the telecom giant to offer 5G services to netizens in the coming months. As per rumors, Jio 5G network services will start rolling out in the second half of 2021.
