Reliance Jio becomes India's biggest spectrum holder

Reliance Jio was the largest purchaser in the auction of 5G spectrum conducted by the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India, over the past week.

Jio confirmed that it acquired spectrum in the 700MHz, 800MHz, 1800MHz, 3300MHz and 26GHz bands. The company said it will use equipment made in India for its 5G rollout.

Jio's total cost of acquiring the technology agnostic spectrum for a period of 20 years is Rs. 88,078 crore. As per terms of the spectrum auction, the spectrum payments have to be made over 20 equated annual instalments, with interest computed at 7.2% per annum. 

Through this acquisition, Jio’s total owned spectrum footprint has increased significantly to 26,772 MHz (uplink + downlink), which is the highest in India:

• Sub-GHz: Jio has the highest amount of sub-GHz spectrum with at least 2X10 MHz contiguous spectrum in both 700 MHz and 800 MHz bands across each of the 22 circles.
• Mid-band: Jio is the only operator which has at least 2X10 MHz in 1800 MHz band (with 2X20 MHz in six key circles), 40 MHz in 2300 MHz band and 100 MHz in 3300 MHz band across all the 22 circles.
• mmWave: In addition, Jio also has right to use 1,000 MHz in the millimetre wave band (26 GHz) in each of the 22 circles which will be crucial to enable enterprise use cases as well as provide high-quality streaming services.

Shri Akash M Ambani, Chairman, Reliance Jio Infocomm issued the following statement:

“We have always believed that India will become a leading economic power in the world by adopting the power of breakthrough technologies. This was the vision and conviction that gave birth to Jio. The speed, scale and societal impact of Jio’s 4G rollout is unmatched anywhere in the world. Now, with a bigger ambition and stronger resolve, Jio is set to lead India’s march into the 5G era. We will celebrate ‘Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav’ with a pan India 5G rollout. Jio is committed to offering world-class, affordable 5G and 5G-enabled services. We will provide services, platforms and solutions that will accelerate India’s digital revolution, especially in crucial sectors like Education, Healthcare, Agriculture, Manufacturing and e-Governance and make another proud contribution to Honourable Prime Minister’s DIGITAL INDIA MISSION.”

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Brookfield acquires 130,000 towers from Reliance Jio for $3.7 billion

by James E. Carroll

Brookfield Infrastructure Partners will acquire a 100% stake in a telecom tower company in India from Reliance Industrial Investments and Holdings Limited for US$3.7 billion, of which Brookfield Infrastructure will invest approximately $375 million, with the balance being funded by its institutional partners.

The deal includes approximately 130,000 communication towers that forms the infrastructure backbone of Reliance Jio’s mobile network.

Brookfield says the majority of the towers are connected by fiber backhaul, which provides a unique platform to capitalize on the rollout of 5G and future technologies. Jio is an anchor tenant of the tower portfolio under a 30-year Master Services Agreement, providing a secure source of revenues for the tower company.

“This is a unique opportunity to invest in a large-scale, high-quality telecom business and participate in India’s high-growth data industry,” said Sam Pollock, Chief Executive Officer of Brookfield Infrastructure. “This is an attractive business that offers downside protection with meaningful upside by co-locating equipment from other Mobile Network Operators on the towers, which to-date, have only carried Jio equipment. Further growth is anticipated through a tower build-out program, which is expected to bring the portfolio to approximately 175,000 towers.”

https://bip.brookfield.com/press-releases/2019/12-16-2019-112919449

AT&T sells 31 data centers to Brookfield Infrastructure for $1.1 billion

Wednesday, January 02, 2019  AT&T, Data Centers  

AT&T completed the sale of its data center colocation operations and assets to Brookfield Infrastructure and its institutional partners for $1.1 billion. This includes 18 Internet Data Centers (IDC) in the United States and 13 outside the United States. The colocation data center operations serve a diversified customer base of more than 1,000 companies. Brookfield has established a wholly owned company, Evoque Data Center Solutions ("Evoque"),.

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Reliance JIO and Cisco collaborate on Multi-Access Edge Computing

Cisco and Reliance Jio are collaborating in multi-access edge computing. The companies are developing a use case to optimize and enhance video experience over the network by building a mobile content delivery network (CDN). In this concept, the CDN is integrated into the mobile LTE network with edge caches in close proximity to the mobile users.

The idea with a mobile CDN is for the mobile operator to deliver content via edge cloudlets to provide a better user experience with lower latency and higher performance.

Cisco said its mobile CDN work with Reliance Jio uses a combination of IP address management techniques based on the mobile core, requiring tight integration between edge cache, mid-tier cache, and the traffic router in the Cisco Open Media Distribution system. The mobile core and the Cisco Open Media Distribution are combined into one system level solution for the CDN embedded in the mobile network.

To solve the problem of user plane selection, the system uses Control/User Plane Separation (CUPS) as defined in 3GPP R14.

Cisco and Reliance Jio also solved the issue of assigning a geographically appropriate IP address to the mobile device and the issue of handover resiliency in the face of IP address changes on the client side and the CDN cache site without change or disturbance to the current services.

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