India remains a 4G country

A YEAR AFTER the launch of 5G services, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel together may have notched up a subscriber base of around 125 million, but are still unable to recoup their investments.

- JATIN GROVER

This is due to the absence of meaningful use cases for which they can charge a premium rate.

As a result, for most 5G smartphone users, 4G continues to be sufficient to meet their daily data usage needs.

The capex of the two operators for rolling out 5G networks is expected to be near 90,000 crore in FY24. However, there has not been any killer application that can replace 4G with 5G and prompt users to upgrade, according to experts.

Therefore, what's on offer and will continue to be so is 5G services at 4G rates.

TV Ramachandran, president Broadband India Forum, said, "It is an open secret that the technology does not provide business viability. This is unsurprising since the experience everywhere is that the real use case of 5G today is only speed and, generally speaking, 4G speeds are more than adequate to provide good quality of experience for customers."

This view is echoed by Bharti Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal. "I think the challenge is that the real use case on 5G today is only speed. You need more applications to be written on 5G networks which really use the benefit of this technology. Unfortunately, that is not the case, not just in India, but in no market anywhere in the world," he said recently.