5G telecom services to be made available from October, says Communications Minister
The Hindu
Prices will be reasonable, BSNL will be market balancer, regulatory framework will be overhauled, says Ashwini Vaishnaw
5G telecom services will be made available in India from October 2022 onwards and the industry would decide on the pricing structure, Union Communications Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Saturday.
“As soon as spectrum auction ends, within a few days itself, we will allocate the auctions. We expect that the rollout will happen starting in October, and within a year or so, we should have a good rollout of 5G in the country,” he said at a press conference after addressing an investors’ summit.
Stating that the 5G rollout all over the world has been slow, he said, “We believe that we will probably buck the trend of having a much faster rollout of 5G compared to many other geographies since our other costs are significantly under control.”
Read | Auctioning 5G spectrum bands
He said in case of high pricing for 5G services, the government would intervene and state-owned BSNL, which will rollout 5G “very rapidly”, will act as a market balancer.
“As regards pricing of 5G services, on an average in the world, cost of telecom services is ₹2,400 [per month] while it is around ₹200 per month in India, data cost is lowest in India in the world,” he said without giving any specific number.
He said that as of Saturday, the government had fetched ₹1.49 lakh crore from 5G spectrum auction and expressed the confidence that this would cross ₹1.5 lakh crore.