Tech Upgrade: Govt gets 5G wagon moving; Telecom dept forms committee to devise strategy

The government wants to know about the current status of availability of 5G products, devices and applications and what can be done to make them available to the consumers.

In the run-up to the rollout of 5G services, the department of telecommunications (DoT) has formed a committee to devise a strategy for commercialisation and monetisation of 5G and a domestically developed 5Gi technologies.

According to sources, the committee, constituted under Member (Technology) of DoT, will seek inputs from stakeholders regarding both the technologies. All the parties concerned, including telecom operators, network providers and others are required to send their comments for the short-term by March next year and a further two years in the long term.

The government wants to know about the current status of availability of 5G products, devices and applications and what can be done to make them available to the consumers.

The DoT will deliberate on the strategy for development of 5G ecosystem in the country and what needs to be done for nurturing and proliferating application ecosystem of 5G. Further, the DoT wants to seek inputs for strategy and plan for commercialisation and monetisation of 5G and 5Gi technologies.

According to sources, the government wants to promote the 5Gi technology and wants operators to utilise it. The 5G trials are currently underway but no operator is doing it with local 5Gi technology. Recently, telecom secretary K Rajaraman had visited IIT Madras to see the indigenous 5G testbed being developed by the institute and other collaborating institutes.

The 5Gi standard has been designed to address the typical Indian rural use case. The government has offered telecom service providers the option to choose between these two standards.

It must be mentioned that earlier this year, the standing committee on information technology, chaired by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, had pulled up DoT for not doing sufficient preparatory work for launching of 5G services in India. The committee had said that at a time when many countries were swiftly moving towards 5G technology, India was likely to witness its deployment only by the end of 2021 or early part of 2022, that too partially.

Countries started to roll out 5G commercially in 2019 but in India it is yet to be commercially launched. Currently, the 5G network covers around 7% of the world population and it is expected that by 2025, 20% of the world population will be covered by 5G. Countries where 5G has been launched include USA, Canada, UK, European Union nations, China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain.