India is gearing for the launch of 5G and the telecom giants of the country are working tirelessly to gain the spectrum for the new technology. However, even if the country introduces new technology 4G the currently existing and fastest telecom network of the country will still be playing a much significant role in the Indian telecom market even after fifth-generation or 5G technology is launched here.
“4G is already the dominant network technology in India and will continue to play a significant role in the market for some years, even after the launch of 5G… We have also observed some recent performance improvements in terms of 4G speeds as operators have deployed more spectrum resources following spectrum auctions held in March this year.”
According to sources, 4G availability is growing in the country, with the ‘4G Service’ metric increasing from 93.5% in Q4 2020 to 96% in Q2 2021. in recent times, download speed over the network has increased from 10.64 Mbps in Q1 2020, to 15.67 Mbps in Q2 2021.
coming to data usage, according to a new report, India ranks amongst the regions with the highest mobile data usage per smartphone globally, at 14.6GB per month. This is higher than the global average of 9GB per month.
“The data indicates that the market is in a very strong position to drive the uptake of 5G services when they are launched in India, catering to the faster speeds that the market demands.”
India is currently the world’s largest smartphone market with the potential to drive market sales in smartphones to new heights after the introduction to 5G in the country. Even the country’s telecoms are rallying to garner support for the up-and-coming tech.
India’s Vodafone Idea has called government support for startups and system integrators (SI) to deploy Open RAN at a large scale. The company’s biggest rival Bharti Airtel said the inter-functionality enabled by Open RAN can be leveraged to build and deploy innovative applications based on new engineering principles.
“Going forward, if TRAI can auction off C-band spectrum (3.3GHz to 3.6GHz) and also secure bids for the 700MHz, it will let telcos increase both the capacity and coverage of their networks. Telcos can then also ensure that the prices are at a level that will help balance demand with network capacity.”
