New Delhi: The government has approved the auction of the 5G spectrum in India. The 5G auction will be held on July 26, 2022. Spectrum above 72 GHz will be auctioned with a validity period of 20 years. The auction will be conducted for range in various low (600 MHz, 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz, 2300 MHz), mid (3300 MHz) and high (26 GHz) frequency bands. The government claims 5G in India will be about ten times faster than 4G.
In case you are wondering when will 5G services be available for end-users in the country, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) said that 5G internet services would be launched in India in 2022. There will be no 5G available immediately across India. Some regions will get 5G first, while 5G may take years to reach all corners of India. For the record, there are still places in India where 4G connectivity is unavailable. Only last week, Pangong Lake in the Ladakh region got 4G connectivity for the first time, thanks to Jio.
According to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), initially, 5G will be available in 13 cities across the country. These 13 cities are Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Gandhinagar, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Jamnagar, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai and Pune.
While we have no information about which telecom operator will be the first to launch 5G services in India commercially, all three major telecom operators, namely Jio, Airtel and Vi (Vodafone Idea), have already set up trial sites in these cities. have done.
DoT has already partnered with eight agencies for the indigenous 5G (/topic/5g) tested project, which started in 2018 and is to be completed by December 31, 2021. These agencies are the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and IIT Delhi. IIT Hyderabad, IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, Indian Institute of Science (IISC) Bangalore, Society for Applied Microwave Electronics Engineering and Research (SAMEER) and Center of Excellence in Wireless Technology (CEWiT).
The government is also considering measures to reduce business costs for telecom service providers. The spectrum auction will benefit from the telecom sector reforms announced in September 2021. The reforms include zero spectrum usage charge (SUC) on spectrum received in the upcoming auction, providing significant relief to service providers in terms of operational cost of telecom. Network. In addition, the requirement of submitting a financial bank guarantee equivalent to one annual instalment has also been dispensed with.
