New Delhi: Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited is aiming for 5G devices with prices comparable to 4G devices. In a recent interview, president and a director on the board of the company Mathew Oommen said that for the fifth generation of cellular mobile communications to be relevant in India, the devices have to be priced reasonable and comparable to their predecessors — 4G devices.

“The industry and the chipmakers need to work closely to achieve targets that are affordable in India. And Jio will play a critical role,” said Oommen, according to Business Standard.

Earlier, Jio said telecom tariffs in the country cannot be raised as there are a large number of people who still use feature phones and companies need to innovate around data to perform.

According to PTI, Oommen said, “As a service provider, we need to know are we going to make GB (gigabyte) cost a little bit lower and make money or little bit higher and make money -- that is not the mechanism. We have to innovate or we will get displaced.”

He cited the example of US and Chinese internet giants who have grown rich on the basis of data. 

"We live in gigabyte economy and not product economy. We as service providers are the enablers for any digital transformation. That digital transformation is enabled by ultra broadband. We need to be invested in data science, artificial and machine learning -- that is going to enable us transform quickly," Oommen said. 

Talking about 5G deployment, he said the ecosystem will be ready by 2019-20 but affordable devices for mass adoption of the service will start coming in India in 2021. 

With PTI inputs