5G Service In India: The Union Cabinet Approved the Auction Of IMT/5G Spectrum

The Union Cabinet has approved the proposal of the Department of Telecommunications to conduct an auction in which spectrum will be assigned to successful bidders for giving 5G service to the public and enterprises.

The auction will be at the end of July 2022. Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea are expected to compete fiercely. Over 72GHz of the spectrum is to be auctioned for 20 years. The reserve cost of spectrum is about ₹5lac crore.

5G is the 5th generation of wireless technology for people. 5G will deeply alter and redesign the current digital and mobile Internet landscape. For India, 5G represents significant new opportunities for our Trillion $ Digital Economy.

It is expected that service providers will use the high and mid-band spectrum to provide 5G technology services. The speed should be approximately 10x that of current 4G services.

The speed of access to the Internet has grown exponentially in India across 2015 and 2018. With a boost from the expansion of 4G mobile services, broadband is much more accessible, with eighty crore subscribers today compared to only ten crore subscribers in 2014.

The availability of sufficient backhaul spectrum is also necessary to enable the roll-out of 5G services. To meet the backhaul demand, the Cabinet has decided to provisionally allot 2 carriers of 250 MHz each in E-band to the Telecom Service Providers. The Cabinet also decided to double the number of traditional Microwave backhaul carriers in the existing frequency bands of 13, 15, 18 and 21 GHz bands.

The Cabinet also decided to enable the development and setting up of Private Captive Networks to spur a new wave of innovations in Industry 4.0 applications such as machine to machine communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) across automotive, healthcare, agriculture, energy, and other sectors.