Are we being too aggressive about 5G in India?

The gaps between the intent and implementation need to be narrowed if not eliminated. 5G is to be seen as a critical infrastructure for the digital economy rather than just another commercial opportunity for all.

Over past few weeks, 5G has been under the spotlight as every week there is one or the other conference about the next evolution of LTE technology. These deliberations are important to capture various views of the value chain and also bridge the government, industry and other stakeholders to work out an implementation plan which is a mirror copy of the intent.

The best part to rejoice is that for the first time since technology has become one of the important elements to the economy, the discussions about a new technology are happening in parallel in India as in other mature markets. If we look into the past, since the mobile communications, India would start discussions about a technology only after 5-8 years in other mature markets. This happened in the case of 2G, 3G, and even 4G. Though the gaps did reduce. But for 5G we are almost at par. The difference would only be that our discussions are still on every facet of the technology, right from policy to monetization. In other countries, discussions are more about implementation to monetization. The reason for this could also be that the Indian telecom operators expect some more support from the government as the financial distress may not make it easy for them to upgrade to the latest generation of LTE.

5G benefits both industry as well as the individual consumers. However, its advantages are more towards industrial and enterprise use, which anyways indirectly benefits the consumer. Even most of the consumer facing benefits also trickle down through B2B2C channel. But, it seems in a rush to start 5G in the country, some ecosystem segments are pushing for massive MIMO or ultra broadband implementation to begin with. This may not be a good approach, even if it brings 5G into limelight and consumers start experiencing 5G directly, thus increasing the visibility of the technology.

Using 5G for ultra broadband, in urban as well as rural has its own challenges. In the urban space, operators have already achieved massive MIMO through carrier aggregation, thus moving to 4.5 or Pre 5G scale of progression. So, using 5G for the same would not make economic sense as the returns on investments on 4G advanced have just begun, which isn’t optimised due to hyper-competition after Jio coming into the picture.

On the rural side, it might be a good idea, but monetising the technology would be a challenge. No doubt, it would bring a lot more population on the digital map of India, monetising the opportunity would be difficult. It has always been a challenge to monetise the technology in the rural India for several reasons, and, if we think of going ahead with 5G to rural India at a time when it is just beginning without a proper value add to the rural lifestyle, there would be no revenues for the operators, unless government facilitates.

We need to see how 5G is getting deployed globally. Either it is being used for industrial scenarios or else in cities for ultra broadband, where the income levels are too high and customer paying capacity is not a concern.

If 5G is to be made a success in India, it need not to be positioned as just another generation of LTE. It has to be applied where a country can benefit the maximum, which may or may not be customer facing, and thus remains out of limelight. Many a times, some segments in the value chain, want technologies to come quick in to the limelight just for earning some quick appreciations and rewards. It should not be our approach with 5G.

This is one of the fundamental things that needs to be corrected before going ahead with 5G India. Else we will only see low value benefits coming in from 5G, from Indian perspective. Getting 4K and 8K content is good, but we have many pressing issues which could be solved by 5G. Unfortunately, we are tagging them as the issues of ‘Bharat’ while all the voices in the ecosystem consider themselves living in ‘India’. So lets not look only in to the use cases of 5G which are fancier and make India catch up the hyped global use cases. We have to workout our ways of doing things, which is a balance of limelight and reality checks.

The second issue is of spectrum pricing. This needs to be rationalised. If government starts 5G with a commercial angle, then how do we expect industry, which is for profit, to not to over price the services limiting its accessibility. We all agree 5G would be instrumental in connecting the people in many ways, creating a connected society. For this to practically happen, all walks of society need to be brought on to the network, which means affordability shall play a key role. To let that happen, operators shall have to see how optimal they could be on CAPEX investments, including on spectrum. 5G needs a different approach, if we all agree that it is not just another generation of evolution of mobile communications. So why not to see it as the critical infrastructure for the digital economy, rather than having a commercial view just from the beginning. Else it looks like something similar to ‘child labour’ practice, where the baby is not even born and we are making money on it.

First published in techRAI in September 2018