Reliance Jio claimed to have developed its own 4G and 5G network gear, in a move to reduce its reliance on imports and lower costs, The Economic Times (ET) reported.

The largest mobile operator in India by subscribers reportedly replaced 4G voice technology from Nokia and Oracle with kit developed in-house, with the goal of becoming self-sufficient when it moves to 5G.

A company representative told ET it developed end-to-end 5G technology, which is fully automated and runs on a cloud-native platform. It aims to manufacture the equipment locally after it completes trials and already applied to the Department of Telecommunications to start the tests.

Jio relied on Samsung for its entire 4G RAN and applied to run 5G trials with the vendor.

To strengthen its position in 5G and IoT, the operator’s parent company Reliance Industries merged subsidiary Rancore Technologies, a developer of 4G software, with Jio in 2017 and acquired US-based software company Radisys in 2018.

While Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, Samsung and ZTE dominate the 5G radio network equipment market, Vietnam-based operator Viettel in January claimed it successfully built its own 5G base station.

In 2019, Viettel unveiled an ambitious plan to develop its own core 5G technology, but since then announced it would use Nokia and Ericsson equipment, so it is unclear if it plans to use its home-grown kit exclusively.