Globally 5G is considered a sine qua non for superfast bandwidth speeds. Countries are raring for 5G rollouts. US, China & South Korea have already launched the services, though in limited areas, and are prepping for the big push by 2020. Japan mobile carriers plan to dazzle the world with its services to coincide with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Every country is working to a schedule.
Not so in India, despite pronouncement of intent. Here top bureaucrats cannot seem to have enough of high level forums, committees and sub-committees. They are losing precious time in discussions in deciding how to allocate 5G spectrum even for trial and experimentation.
On Mar 16, 2019 China performed a brain pacemaker implantation surgery in a medical center in Beijing from a remote location using 5G technology. On Apr 3, 2019 South Korea claimed to have beaten the US by a matter of hours to become the first country to roll out, at 11 pm local time, a super-fast 5G mobile network. A few hours later, on the same day, Verizon in the US said that it had pulled ahead in the US race to launch 5G and became the first to launch a 5G network in select areas of Chicago and Minneapolis.
The US and South Korea are among several countries hoping for a share of 5G-related economic benefits estimated to be worth $565 billion globally by 2034.
However, in India, DoT has not yet decided how to allocate spectrum. It is just engaged in constituting committee after committee. Initially it was High Level Forum (HLF) chaired by Prof. Dr Paul Raj. On Feb 25, 2019, DoT formed another committee under the chairmanship of Prof. Dr Abhay Karandikar. Now Dr Karandikar states, “5G trials may happen towards the end of this year or early next year. Early deployments may happen in the second or third quarter of 2020.”
In a recent meet of Mobile World Congress (MWC) held in Barcelona, Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal said that the government must encourage 5G rollout in the country at the earliest by supporting the telecom sector in terms of pricing of spectrum at reasonable levels and lowering various levies. He said, all equipment currently being deployed by Airtel are 5G ready. On the other hand, Reliance Jio has also stated that it is ready to launch 5G services in India.
When all the major telcos in India are saying that they are ready to launch 5G services once the spectrum is allocated, then why DoT has not auctioned it so far! It is sitting on spectrum worth over Rs 5 lakh crore. In fact, DoT should adopt a standard methodology of inviting EoIs for spectrum auctions every six months. This will heighten government’s Ease of Doing Business call. It will also solve QoS issues.
