Govt policies & Interventions

KEY POINTS

·         High-speed broadband serves as the pillar of digital transformation, and remains the top priority for all the stakeholders alike.

·         5G would significantly contribute in this direction in transforming everyday lives of Indians by resolving real issues within e-healthcare, e-education, infrastructure and e-governance.

Challenges

·         Investment in fiberisation– The transition to 5G presents challenges due to diversities in network densification, disparate data offload strategies and uncertainties around backhaul technology.

·         With 5G requiring highest capacity backhaul to deliver its intended peak data rates, fibre has become a critical backhaul and transport technology.

·         Regulatory hurdles – Currently, Right of Way (RoW) charges vary from a few lakh rupees to `1.5 crore per km across different states.

·         With states having different RoW policies, telecoms are losing out significant amount of their infrastructure investments to municipal bodies across states.

·         On the government side, issues such as RoW across different states must be addressed on priority.

·         While the government tried to resolve this issue through new RoW rules by standardizing processes and fixing applicable charges, its implementation has not been realized on ground.

·         Urgency around fiberisation — 5G is intended to support mission-critical applications such as financial transactions and healthcare, and latency and high speed will be achieved by immediate investment in fiberisation.

Steps taken by India

·         NTP – Union government has initiated measures to introduce 5G technology in India via the National Telecom Policy (NTP), from March 2018.

·         GoI has committed to fiberisation being an integral part of the new NTP.

·         It aims to achieve 100% tele-density, high-speed internet highways and delivery of citizen-centric services electronically.

·         For anNTP to be proper, it should encourage investments in fibre backhaul, bring in standardization, ease RoW issues and also help envision a development roadmap for digital highways in the country.

·         Forum to develop 5G roadmap – Recently, the Department of Telecommunications set up a high-level forum to develop the roadmap for operationalizing 5G services in India by 2020.

·         Waivers for Private telecoms – The government also announced a subsidy of `3,600 crore to private telecom players such as BhartiAirtel, Vodafone India and Reliance Jio to set up Wi-Fi in rural areas as part of the second phase of the BharatNet project.

·         100% fiberisation – The market has realized that optical fibre-enabled access services are the only future-proof technologies as they accommodate the demands arising from evolving market conditions.

·         Most private telecoms are already playing their part in fiberisation. Yet the last-mile fibre coverage is still only about 25-30%.

·         These efforts, coupled with BharatNet, will take this up to 60-70%.

The 5G technology aims to deliver about 10 gigabits per second in urban areas and 1 Gbps in rural regions. 5G offers significantly lower latency – a data transfer delay of one millisecond (ms) and lower battery consumption. In India, 5G can dramatically improve user-governance experience by supporting high-quality videos and speeding up file transfers, resolving real issues within e-healthcare, e-education, infrastructure and e-governance. The biggest impact could be on new-age connected technologies, namely the Internet-of-Things.

Challenges to 5G in India:

1. Infrastructure development:

• Moving to 5G is more tedious and capital-intensive as it requires a discrete change in transport, radio, and core network components.
• Tower fiberisation will need to be 100%, connecting small cells, buildings and homes.
• Last mile fibre network connectivity is lacking in India 

2. Data centre expansion:

• India data centre market (data and cloud services) is growing up with brisk pace.
• As this market rapidly expands, fibre will be critical to drive high-speed and low-latency requirements, both within the data centres and connectivity between data centres.

3. Fibre Network:

• Investment in fibre infrastructure is the key to 5G roll-out.

4. Regulatory Mechanism

• New comprehensive policy and spectrum, regulatory mechanism is needed for 5G roll-out

Steps taken by Government

1. BharatNet:

• This project aims at providing affordable broadband connectivity to all households and institutions.
• This project led to development in fibre network infrastructure across the country. 

2. The Centre has initiated measures to introduce 5G technology in India via the National Telecom Policy (NTP)

3. Forum to develop 5G roadmap:

• Recently, the Department of Telecommunications set up a high-level forum to develop the roadmap for operationalising 5G services in India by 2020.
• This forum included all leading players in telecom sector.

Way forward:

• Fiberisation and infrastructure development,
• Regulatory support from the government,
• Industry-government collaboration
• Research projects, PPP projects and strong regulatory framework

All these are need for India to achieve a leadership position in the adoption of 5G, by 2020.