New Delhi: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Friday released a consultation paper seeking industry feedback on policy bottlenecks towards faster adoption of 5G-driven technologies for businesses. Written inputs can be sent in till 30 October, with counter-comments sought on 13 November.
The paper seeks to boost adoption of technologies such as artificial intelligence, extended reality and the internet of things (IoT), which will be key factors that enable automation across enterprises.
The paper, seen by Mint, said that adoption of new technologies among enterprises “will require effective ecosystem collaboration between telecom service providers, original equipment manufacturers, infrastructure providers and the government to increase consumer adoption and market readiness—to unlock large-scale benefits of 5G.”
It also identified the need to upgrade infrastructure to meet the standards of 5G connectivity, “fiberization” of networks to deploy 5G among enterprises, and densifying networks in order to help enterprises adopt new technologies.
Adoption of 5G via captive networks for enterprises hit a roadblock in India as telcos and large enterprises clashed over access to 5G spectrum. While companies pushed for direct allocation of 5G spectrum from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), citing greater flexibility of deployment and privacy, telecom operators lobbied against the move by stating that such allocation and deployments would be expensive, inefficient and eventually lead to operational burdens.
On 26 May, the DoT rolled out a decision in favour of telcos, deciding against allocating direct 5G spectrum to enterprises.
Telcos, however, appears to have been unsuccessful in lobbying for preferential pricing of spectrum allocation for over-the-top (OTT) streaming and communication services. While the likes of Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone-Idea wrote to Trai underlining “disproportionate” infrastructure cost incurred by telcos due to heavy data usage by services such as Netflix and WhatsApp, government officials have so far maintained that no preferential pricing of 5G network is being considered right now—in order to maintain net neutrality.
Deployment of 5G infrastructure across enterprises in India also saw a gradual slowdown among India’s large-cap information technology (IT) service providers amid an overall weakening in global tech spending among enterprises. T
he slowdown in 5G spending was largely prevalent in North America, due to macroeconomic concerns and a weak overall forecast on spending viability for the rest of the year.
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Updated: 29 Sep 2023, 06:04 PM IST