At the India Mobile Conference on 1 October, the country announced the official launch of its 5G mobile network, with telecoms operators Airtel and Jio already preparing plans related to the launch in selected cities such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Varanasi and Delhi.
Experts believe that mobile users will get speeds of 600Mbps in the initial phase of 5G.
Jio and Airtel have already announced that customers will not need to upgrade their SIM cards to get 5G support, and Jio has already announced policies that will give users up to 1Gbps+ network speeds and unlimited traffic as part of the test. The service will then be gradually rolled out to other cities.
Ericsson experts believe that Jio mentions that 5G will have 1Gbps+ speeds, but this will only be possible very close to mobile base stations. ” 5G is expected to offer speeds of up to 600mbps during the launch phase, as traffic on the network will be very low. However, it will continue to be in the range of 200-300mbps after the full rollout”.
Anupam Shrivastava, former chairman of BSNL (the state-run telecom company under the Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications, India), said the telecom operator may offer free 5G services to subscribers before the full rollout. “Once the rollout in the circle is over, telecom operators may announce their tariff plans and charge higher rates for 5G than 4G.”
Nokia’s senior vice president and head of marketing for India, Sanjay Malik, mentioned that the high speed of 5G would double the average data consumption per user in India within a year and a half.
In June 2022, Ericsson released a mobile report that mentioned that 5G is scaling faster than all previous mobile devices and is expected to account for nearly 40% of all users in India by 2027.
In July this year, India opened its 5G spectrum auction. The auction was for 72097.85 MHz of spectrum valid for 20 years, including the 600 MHz, 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz, 2300 MHz, 3300 MHz and 26 GHz bands.
