India Cell Congress — or IMC 2024 — was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday, alongside the World Telecommunication Standardisation Meeting (WTSA) 2024. On the annual digital know-how discussion board, a number of milestones within the areas of cellular community connectivity, broadband adoption, and optical fibre community enlargement had been highlighted by the Prime Minister. Over the course of this week, IMC 2024 will see participation from telecom operators like Reliance Jio and Airtel, in addition to know-how companies like Xiaomi and Qualcomm.
Inaugurating the eighth version of the India Cell Congress, PM Modi mentioned that India now has 1.2 billion cellular customers and greater than 950 million web customers, whereas the nation accounts for over 40 p.c of worldwide real-time digital transactions.
“India leads globally in knowledge affordability, with knowledge costing simply Rs. 12 per GB, whereas many international locations cost 10-12X extra,” the PM Modi mentioned, including that 5G community protection had expanded to all districts within the nation, whereas the optical fibre community was expanded by a fantastic deal over the previous 10 yeas, masking over eight occasions the space between the Moon and Earth.
One other space highlighted by the Prime Minister was the rise in smartphone manufacturing within the nation, The Prime Minister additionally pointed to investments in semiconductor know-how, in addition to efforts to provide solely ‘Made-in-India’ handsets, together with elements like processors.
In the meantime, Bharti Enterprises Chairman Sunil Mittal shared particulars of Airtel’s not too long ago launched anti-spam know-how that’s designed to dam calls from scammers and fraudulent messages, with the intention to defend customers. “We at the moment are working with the business to make sure, and with the Division of Telecom, that our folks, once they’re utilizing these networks and having fun with all these companies, are secure and safe,” Mittal added.
Vodafone Thought (Vi) promoter Kumar Mangalam Birla mentioned on Tuesday that the beleaguered telecom operator’s capex cycle was kickstarted by its follow-on-public provide (FPO), the place it reportedly obtained bids value Rs. 90,000 crore, permitting Vi to announce new capex offers with Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung.
“At Vi, we’re serving to MSMEs break limitations and entry new markets by means of 5G, IoT, AI, and cloud applied sciences. With our Vi Enterprise ReadyForNext program, over 1.6 lakh MSMEs at the moment are future-ready. As we construct a world the place digital and augmented actuality grow to be a part of each day life, we stay dedicated to empowering small companies to guide India’s digital development,” Birla mentioned.
Reliance Jio Chairman Akash Ambani pushed for knowledge localisation at IMC 2024. “The dimensions and pace of multilingual knowledge era in India, which can drive the AI revolution, will develop exponentially. We request the federal government to expedite the updating of the 2020 draft of the Knowledge Centre Coverage that Indian knowledge ought to stay in India’s knowledge centres,” he mentioned.
At IMC 2024, Jio additionally introduced the launch of two new function telephones with 4G connectivity — JioBharat V3 and JioBharat V4. The handsets arrive a yr after the JioBharat V3 was launched in India, and provide entry to the web in addition to the corporate’s digital companies together with JioPay and JioCinema.