Reliance Jio demonstrates its satellite-based gigabit internet in India

Reliance Jio on Friday announced that it successfully demonstrated India’s first satellite-based gigabit internet service, which can potentially be used to provide high-speed internet services to inaccessible areas in the country.

Dubbed JioSpaceFiber, the new technology was demonstrated by the company at India Mobile Congress on Friday. Jio says it is partnering with Luxembourg-based satellite communications company SES to provide medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellite internet.

The company claims that SES’s O3v and o3b mPOWER networks are the only MEO constellation capable of delivering fiber-like internet services from space.

The more common method of delivering high-speed satellite internet usually involves constellations of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. LEO satellites orbit at a height of between 250 and 2,000 kilometres above the planet.

Both Starlink, the service provided by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and the solution by OneWeb, a company backed by India’s Bharti group, use LEO satellite technology for low-latency, high-speed internet.