High-level panel to meet on early roll-out of 5G services
NEWDELHI: A top panel, formed in September by the department of telecom, will meet on Wednesday this week with the aim of devising strategies for early deployment of 5G services in India, several people in the know of the matter said.
The panel, that has representations from the industry, government and academics, aims to develop a competitive product portfolio for 5G with an objective of targeting 50% of the Indian market and 10% of global market over the next seven years.
Representatives from top internet service providers and telecom service providers, Bharti Airtel’s CEO Gopal Vittal, Reliance Jio’s MD Sanjay Mashruwala, among them, who are part of the high-level panel, are expected to attend the meeting.
The government aims to deploy 5G services for consumers by 2020 and had in September this year set up a 22-member panel, chaired by Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan, and tasked with evaluating and approving roadmaps and action plans for the technology rollout.
5G is the next generation of wireless access technology, which promises higher data capacity and speeds over 10 GB per second and also has the capacity to connect billions of devices. According to industry estimates, 5G will also bring down the cost of transmitting packets of data on the network to one-tenth of that on a 4G network. The technology is also likely to trigger progress across usages such as autonomous cars and Internet of Things (IoT).
The move may also provide an opportunity to the government to attempt afresh to sell certain airwaves which are ideally suited for 5G services.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had in August floated a consultation paper inviting stakeholder views on the next auction of spectrum bands, including 3300-3400 MHz and 3400-3600 MHz spectrum bands used for 5G mobile services.
The panel will focus on creating a research ecosystem for intellectual property rights development, standards development and proof of concepts through research projects, public-private partnership projects, test beds and pilot roll-outs.
The government has approved a corpus of ₹500 crore for research and development in 5G, Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha had said in September.
The Department of Telecommunications has approved a 5G technologies test-bed at IIT Madras which is expected to be operational in the next six months, a recent report by Morgan Stanley said.