The Indian government said on Friday that the “cumulative economic impact” of the 5G services in the country will reach $450 billion by 2035, as the authorities gear themselves for rolling out the country’s first 5G services this week.
“5G can unleash new economic opportunities and societal benefits, giving it the potential for being a transformational force for Indian society,” a statement from the Ministry of Communications said on Friday.
The ministry added that the 5G technology would also “spur innovations” by startups and other business enterprises, as well as advance the Digital India program, which was launched by Prime Minister Modi in 2015 and aims to make government, financial and other services available through the internet.
Noting the government's “years of intense preparations" in the lead-up to the rollout of 5G services, the ministry statement explained that Department of Telecommunication (DOT) rules were relaxed in 2016 so that 5G infrastructure could be installed on “street furniture”, which essentially means objects that contain small-cell units in boxes.
The statement said that a 5G ‘testbed’ was developed in 2018, which later provided a ground for testing the technology on a small-scale before a large-scale rollout.
It recalled that an inter-ministerial group comprising officials from 12 federal ministries was constituted in 2021 in order to coordinate the rolling out of the 5G services.
The statement also underlined efforts by the Centre for Development of Automatics (C-DOT), a government-backed research institution, to develop an indigenous 5G technology for the country.
“C-DOT has developed an indigenous 5G Non-Stand Alone (NSA) core. C-DOT is also developing 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) in collaboration with local industry and start-ups,” said the statement.
The ministry noted that the auctions for the 5G spectrum were finally conducted this year, which resulted in the government allocating 51,236 Megahertz (MHz) of spectrum which was sold to telecom industry players at a combined cost of over $18 billion.
“The auction aggregated the demand for a robust 5G ecosystem that can cater to its use cases involving Internet of Things (IoT), machine-to-machine (M2M), artificial intelligence (AI), edge computing, robotics,” the official statement added.