Samsung Electronics said it will team up with India’s Long Term Evolution mobile operator Reliance Jio Infocomm to build more high-speed wireless communication networks in India’s remote regions as well as major cities.

Tapping the rapidly growing telco market in India, South Korea’s tech giant clinched an exclusive deal with Jio in 2012 to supply 4G LTE network equipment. After two years of network building across India between 2014 and 2016, the Indian telco firm launched the service in September 2016. Within less than six months, the Indian operator secured 100 million subscribers.

The two firms’ latest joint project called the “Infill & Growth Project” aims to offer fourth-generation LTE services for more than 90 percent of India’s 1.3 billion population and double the traffic capacity of networks, the company said.

The two companies held a joint press conference at the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, Spain, to go over their partnership in recent years and announce future plans.


“Samsung Electronics will closely cooperate with Jio on various solutions, LTE Advanced Pro and (the)5G sector to maximize (Indian) subscribers’ user experience,” said Kim Young-ky, the president and head of networks business at Samsung Electronics. LTE Advanced Pro refers to an advanced version of LTE for the fifth-generation standard.

Jyotindra Thacker, president of Reliance Jio, said its supply of “the most efficient” LTE service in partnership with Samsung led to the rapid growth of the Indian subscribers of Jio.

According to Samsung, a Jio subscriber uses 15 gigabytes of data per month on average, on the company’s 4G LTE networks that can accommodate 1 billion gigabytes of mobile data traffic per month. Such mobile data usage is the level of combined mobile data usage in the US, according to the company.

For the partnership with Jio, Samsung provides base stations along with total solutions for 4G LTE including Voice over LTE that support voice calls over an LTE network, the company said.

Jio’s entry into the mobile market with the high-speed service shifted the Indian telco market from voice call-focused plans to data-focused ones with free voice calls, it said.

By Kim Yoon-mi (yoonmi@heraldcorp.com)