Mumbai: Jio Platforms has built a 5G base station small enough to hang from an office ceiling, and it is aimed at the one place Indian 5G still struggles — indoors.
The Pico Small Cell is a compact unit that can be mounted on walls or ceilings and operates primarily in standalone 5G mode. It is designed for floor-level deployment in enterprise buildings, which means one box per floor rather than one tower per campus.
The engineering choice that matters most is what it leaves out. Traditional distributed antenna systems need long copper feeder cables running from a central point to every antenna. The Pico integrates signal processing and radio components into the unit itself, so the feeder cable disappears.
It works in the n78 band, the 3.3 to 3.6 GHz range that carries most Indian 5G traffic, complies with 3GPP Release 17, and uses a software-defined radio architecture. Jio lists peak download throughput of up to 1 Gbps and upload throughput of 75 Mbps, with user-plane latency below 15 to 20 milliseconds. The company notes that actual speeds will depend on signal conditions and the devices connected.
On power, Jio claims amplifier efficiency of at least 35 per cent and up to 20 per cent lower consumption during periods of low network usage — the difference between a box that runs all night at full draw and one that idles.
Multiple units can be configured and managed automatically across floors, which is the part that decides whether an enterprise rollout is a purchase or a project.
What Jio has not said is where any of this will be installed, or when. No deployment locations, no pricing, no rollout timeline has been disclosed.
For a company that has spent the past four years arguing that its own equipment stack keeps 5G costs down, the Pico is the next piece of that argument: the last few metres inside the building, where outdoor coverage stops and Wi-Fi usually takes over.