Google and Jio’s jugalbandi will bring 5G revolution in India

Alphabet’s Google is partnering with Reliance Jio in the cloud. It will then help the nation’s largest wireless carrier design technology solutions for its enterprise and consumer offerings. As Reliance Jio is preparing to launch 5G services soon. The tie-up will give Jio the expertise of a global tech giant as it expands digital services for small and medium businesses as well as millions of individual customers. This will give Google the unmatched scale of Reliance, whose new-age business ranges from telecom to e-commerce.

Jio tycoon is part of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s oil-to-retail conglomerate Reliance Industries.
“This is a comprehensive partnership, with multiple parts of Alphabet working together,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Reuters in an interview on Thursday ahead of Reliance’s annual shareholders meeting.
“Our own partnership extends across multiple segments of Jio to not just the communications business… but health, retail and more. And it allows us to bring our technology to consumers in India and the many businesses run by Reliance.

Kurian said that while Google is working with other telcos on 5G around the world, the Jio-Google Cloud partnership is the biggest scale for the California-headquartered company.
He declined to share the terms of the cloud contract with Jio.
Jio entered into a 10-year alliance with Microsoft in 2019, which aims to build data centers across India. It will be hosted on Azure Cloud to provide services to the emerging start-up economy of the country.

Jio stunned India’s telecom market in 2016 when it launched with cut-price data plans and free voice services. It beat many competitors outside the market and is now the largest mobile carrier in India with over 422 million subscribers.

Google invested $4.5 billion (about Rs 33,370 crore) in Jio’s parent Jio Platforms last year. It was a move that landed the US tech giant a rare board seat with rival Facebook, which invested $5.7 billion (about Rs 42,270 crore) in the digital entity.
Ambani has previously said that Jio, which also counts Qualcomm and Intel among its backers, will be a “harbinger of the 5G revolution” in India in 2021.