Reliance Jio to use Hughes satellite to provide 4G services in rural areas

Reliance Jio has inked over $10 million deal with satellite solutions provider Hughes Jupiter System for providing 4G services in rural and remote areas.

The Mukesh Ambani-led company will use the technology to connect more than 400 sites with bandwidth in the range of 30-50 megabit per second in remote and rural locations for the services, a Hughes official said.

"After an extensive evaluation of the satellite technology on the market, we felt strongly that the Hughes Jupiter System, with its high-throughput terminals and future-proof multiservice capabilities, provided the ideal performance and efficiency for supporting connectivity to our 4G/LTE sites," Jyotindra Thacker, Group president, Reliance Jio said.

Hughes Communications President Partho Banerjee said satellite is the ideal technology for extending 4G service to remote and rural communities beyond the reach of terrestrial network.

Hughes Communications India senior vice-president and head of enterprise business Shivaji Chatterjee said that Reliance Jio has plans to go extremely rural in hilly, island and forest area.

"Reliance Jio has purchased satellite bandwidth from ISRO and Hughes has engineered technology to deploy the services. Most of the 400 sites are already live. All the sites will go live by March 2019," Chatterjee said.

He said Hughes Jupiter system which is being deployed under the contract will transfer data from the site directly to Reliance Jio core network.

Under the agreement with Jio, Hughes India will provide a managed service to include network planning, implementation, operation and maintenance.

"The supply side of the contract is over which is over USD 10 million and in addition to this there is contract for operational and maintenance of 10 years," Chatterjee said.