5G Launch Date in India Confirmed

• PM Modi will launch 5G services at the India Mobile Congress which begins from the October 1.

• While suspense still continues in terms of how many telcos will showcase their 5G services, the infrastructure is already being put in place. Delhi’s Indira Gandhi international airport has now become India’s first 5g ready airport.

• Statement from the airport said, “Flyers having a 5g-enabled mobile phone set and sim card can experience better signal, seamless connectivity and faster data at the domestic departure pier and international arrival baggage at T3.

• Passengers will be able to experience 20 times faster speed compared to available Wi-Fi networks.

• The timeline by telcos is still not clear but we did hear in August from Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, who said it will happen before the festival of Diwali in October. Earlier this month, Airtel also hinted that it's coming soon when they said, ‘it's expected within a month.”

• What is clear though is that the roll out will take place in a phased manner with 13 cities being in the first batch which includes Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Gandhinagar, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Jamnagar, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, and Pune.

• As you might recall, the IT minister Ashwini Vaishnav last month had said the government expects 5g services to be rolled out in the country by October 12, and the Centre will make sure that the prices are affordable for the consumers.

• 5g will be the fastest upgrade in the long-term evolution of mobile broadband networks.

• It is believed to be about 10 times faster than its predecessor, delivering peak data transfer speeds of up to 20 gigabytes per second or more than 100 megabytes per second.

• As per a report by Ericsson Consumer Labs, more than 100 million users with 5g-ready smartphones wish to upgrade to a 5g subscription in 2023 while a majority of them are open to adopting a higher data-tiered plan in the next 12 months.

• Another report by Ericsson – 5g for Business: a 2030 Market Compass study says, the projected value of the 5g-enabled digitalization revenues for service providers in India will be approximately $17 billion by 2030. 5g will not only enable the operators to manage the growing data needs of consumers more efficiently but also help open new revenue streams for them.

• To the most important aspect from a consumer perspective on pricing, while all telcos are tightlipped but if you do a comparison of what we have seen globally it is a possibility that telcos could begin from a lower band, quoting from a Jeffries report, “while Chinese telcos focused on a lower price/gb metric with similar price points to promote adoption, South Korean telcos offered high data allowance/unlimited plans and bundled it with content/vas services to drive 5g uptake,”