Reliance Jio Infocomm wants Samsung to provide 4G devices at Rs 5,000: Report

Reliance Industries has been in negotiations with Samsung about bringing 4G-capable devices at affordable prices. According to reports, however, the negotiations don’t seem to be going very well. According to the Economic Times, Reliance Jio Infocomm, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, wanted the device for Rs 5,000 each.

However, Samsung refused to deliver the device at a price lower than Rs 8,500. Moreover, the Korean company only agreed to sell it at the cost if Reliance was willing to buy more than 3 million handsets. If the number was lower than that, the price of the device would have been Rs 11,000 each.

Reliance more or less has a monopoly in India for its high-speed broadband, since it is the only company in the country to have the all-India airwaves for it. The company also has approval to provide voice services over its network. However, Samsung doesn’t seem to be biting.

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Samsung wants a better price for its 4G devices

Three years ago, Reliance had bought 20MHz spectrum in the 2.3GHz band in an auction by the government for Rs 13,000 crore. With this, the company has been planning on launching its own TDD-LTE service, which is one of the LTE services available on the planet. The other LTE service is on the 700MHz band and is used all over the world except for India and China.

Both India and China have a stifled 4G service as compared to the rest of the world because of the limited number of devices that use the TDD-LTE technology. China manages to make do with many devices from Huawei.

Reliance is also said to be in talks with Huawei about bringing its 4G devices to India at affordable prices.