India Mobile 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 expertise discussion board, a number of milestones within the areas of cell community connectivity, broadband adoption, and optical fibre community growth have 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 expertise corporations like Xiaomi and Qualcomm.

Inaugurating the eighth version of the India Cell Congress, PM Modi mentioned that India now has 1.2 billion cell 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 an awesome deal over the previous 10 yeas, overlaying over eight occasions the gap 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 expertise, in addition to efforts to provide fully ‘Made-in-India’ handsets, together with elements like processors.

In the meantime, Bharti Enterprises Chairman Sunil Mittal shared particulars of Airtel’s lately launched anti-spam expertise that’s designed to dam calls from scammers and fraudulent messages, as a way to shield customers. “We at the moment are working with the business to make sure, and with the Division of Telecom, that our folks, after they’re utilizing these networks and having fun with all these companies, are protected and safe,” Mittal added.

Vodafone Concept (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 acquired bids price Rs. 90,000 crore, permitting Vi to announce new capex deals with Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung.

“At Vi, we’re serving to MSMEs break obstacles and entry new markets by 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 turn out to be a part of day by day life, we stay dedicated to empowering small companies to steer India’s digital progress,” Birla said.

Reliance Jio Chairman Akash Ambani pushed for knowledge localisation at IMC 2024. “The size and velocity of multilingual knowledge era in India, which is able to 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 characteristic telephones with 4G connectivity — JioBharat V3 and JioBharat V4. The handsets arrive a 12 months 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.