5G in India ( Dwaipayan Mondal)

 

What does 5G spectrum auction delay mean for India?

There were two significant developments relating to 5G in India recently. The first is that the 5G spectrum auction is likely to be postponed from this year to early 2022, as per recent media reports. This will further push the launch of 5G services to at least the second half of 2022 or early 2023. The second is that after the clearance of 5G trials, the industry has finally acquired spectrum to conduct 5G trials, albeit with several riders and conditions.

 

While India has always lagged in adopting new communications standards, the country wanted to take the lead in the launch of 5G and also wanted to increase its involvement in setting standards. Being the second-largest telecom market in the world, these were not lofty goals. 

India set up a High-Level Committee in 2018 to develop India-specific use cases. The country also set aside a budget of INR224 to set up an end-to-end 5G testbed with some of the prominent engineering institutes. These were all first-time initiatives for India.

So, the delay in conducting planned 5G trials and 5G spectrum auction hurts, but apart from the fact that India missed the early 5G bus, what does this delay mean for the industry?

Whither use cases?

The biggest problem and the real reason why there is little pressure on the government to accelerate 5G is that, as of now, the technology doesn't seem to offer any clear use cases or even the promise of better ARPU.

Experts believe that the delay is unlikely to result in any real revenue loss for the country. "Our research shows that there is only a slight ARPU [Average Revenue Per User] uplift of 9% to 10% because of 5G. Further, 5G use cases open up only with Standalone (5G SA) version which any away wouldn't have happened even if Indian telcos had launched 5G this year," says Ashwinder Sethi, Principal at Analysys Mason.

Further, the telcos are struggling to charge a premium for 5G services even in mature and developed telecoms markets. For instance, in South Korea, more than 500,000 5G users decided to switch back to 4G earlier this year because of poor 5G network experience.  

Enterprise segment?

So, if a telco wants to offer only better broadband speeds, NSA is the way to go. However, if the aim is to provide new use cases like Industry 4.0, then the service providers need to go for 5G SA.

This brings us to the enterprise use cases, which are primarily based on Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) and Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (urLLC).

 

The impact of this is minimal in India because mMTC and urLLC use cases are not yet developed globally as well. The chances are that by the time Indian telcos get the spectrum to play with the 5G ecosystem would be mature.

There is also a thought that delay in 5G deployment should not prevent us from utilizing the benefits and applications of the technology. 5G-enabled private wireless networks are emerging as one of the biggest use cases for the enterprise segment.

 

"Use of Private 5G networks, a powerful tool to digitalize manufacturing, healthcare, transportation and other critical sectors, may be permitted, to drive efficiencies and productivity for the nation. In fact, this could have been facilitated already, since private networks are not constrained by the challenges of spectrum auction or onerous licensing/security requirements," says TV Ramachandran, President, Broadband India Forum.

The question of 5G trials

It was somewhat of a pathbreaking announcement when the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) decided to hold 5G trials about three years back. This was mainly because India has not held tests for any technology before launching it. While it possibly made sense three years back when the standards were being formed, the tests are hardly relevant now when there are more than 200 million 5G subscribers in the world.

 

"5G has already been adopted and deployed in 57 countries with 228.7 million subscribers, commercially launched by more than 150 operators (as per GSA), and various use cases have been established, there is surely no longer need for trials in India. We can learn and benefit hugely from the experience of the others into building more robust networks and improved customer experience, and directly go into commercial launch of 5G," says TV Ramachandran, President, Broadband India Forum (BIF).

Instead of conducting trials, the telcos need to focus on increasing fiberization, which is required in order to provide a true 5G experience. Only 25% of the sites are fiberized in the country right now, making it challenging for the telcos to deliver on the promise of 5G.

What about 5Gi?

Delay in 5G spectrum auction helps the Government push for acceptability of the homegrown 5G standard, 5Gi, which allows for wider coverage and is especially relevant for rural coverage. There is strong resistance from the private telcos in using this standard allegedly because of interoperability issues. The telcos also say that 5Gi is likely to increase the cost of network deployment. 

From Bharti Airtel's perspective, it has maintained that India will be ready for 5G only in 2022, so the delay is in line with its timeline. For Jio, the delay impacts its vendor ambition to sell its homegrown 5G solution globally. By the time it is able to test the solution in its network, the mature and developed markets would have adopted 5G, leaving little opportunity for the telco.

While overall, the delay is beneficial for the service providers, there is little doubt that 5G would have allowed the telcos to provide a better network experience to the users, especially so in these times when our dependency on the communications networks is high.

 

~By, Dwaipayan Mondal