Initiative led by Jio Platforms Limited will combine AMD’s computing solutions, Cisco’s networking and security, and Nokia’s RAN and core technologies.
One of the more interesting news items to come out of this month’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona event is a partnership announcement led by India mobile operator Jio Platforms Limited (JPL). Jio has teamed up with AMD, Cisco and Nokia to build an AI-enabled platform for telecom networks. The goal is to make networks smarter, more secure and more efficient to help service providers cut costs and develop new services.
For those not familiar with Jio, the subsidiary of Reliance is one of the largest mobile operators in the world with over 480 million subscribers. Although China Mobile can claim more users, Jio carries more mobile data than any other operator, said Mathew Oommen, group CEO of JPM.
Over the years, the price of bandwidth pricing has continued to fall, which has allowed Jio to offer service at a lower cost. “When we launched Jio [in 2016], the cost of bandwidth was about $6 per gigabit. Today, it’s less than 10 cents,” Oommen shared with me at MWC25.
Greater connectivity is critical for a country like India, which is one of the most digitally enabled. With AI being on the horizon, Jio is focusing on making it available to everyone. “We want to democratize AI because we don’t want it creating a new divide, the AI-divide, similar to the digital divide we had several years ago,” Oommen said.
To accomplish this, it’s not just network or chip pricing that needs to fall but the entire ecosystem. “This isn’t just about the cost per gigabit, but it’s also the cost of tokens, power, infrastructure and security. This is why we wanted to bring these vendors together,” Oommen said.
The Open Telecom AI Platform will act like a smart network control system, using a mix of large language models (LLM), domain-specific small language models (SLM), and non-generative AI machine learning (ML) techniques. It will combine different partner expertise: AMD’s computing solutions, Cisco’s networking and security knowledge, and Nokia’s RAN and core technologies.
Its accessible and flexible design will allow telecom providers, across the globe, to add AI capabilities to various parts of their infrastructure, including radio access networks (RAN), security systems, data centers, and network routing. This will make networks more manageable and responsive to issues, resulting in a smoother user experience.
Jio will be the first to try out this new platform in hopes of setting an example for other telecom providers around the world. According to Jio, the goal is to create a model that others can easily follow and put into action going forward. Oommen expects the first innovation from this alliance to come in this calendar year.
For Cisco, this alliance is a continuation of the strategy put in place several years ago to be more interoperable and open. Historically, Cisco has been accused of being closed and proprietary and keeping customers locked into their products. While I think the competitive chatter was far greater than the reality, there was some truth to it.
This is something Jeetu Patel, who took on the role of chief product officer last year, has changed.
“Over the past three to four years, we have made a huge amount of progress in this area. We have partnerships with Microsoft in security; our collaboration products work with Microsoft Teams and Zoom; our XDR takes in telemetry from competitors; and we have partnerships with multiple AI companies,” Patel told me.
The willingness to be open is something all vendors should embrace as openness creates better competition and drives innovation and brings costs down. The democratization of AI creates a better world, like the way making the Internet ubiquitous did. The Open Telecom AI Platform allows more companies to participate in AI and share in the upside creating a “rising tide” that will fundamentally transform telecommunications, which is long overdue.
AI is coming, but it’s only useful if everyone has access to it. The Jio-led initiative will first be tested and deployed in India, but I’m hopeful other service providers will follow this lead. AI is rapidly becoming network centric, putting network operators in a prime position to be a key vendor to its customers. However, the same could be said for cloud, and the telcos let that opportunity slip away. The question is, will the same thing happen with AI?
