5G dreams: A tech revolution hits roadblocks

India's swift 5G rollout encounters hurdles as operators struggle to monetise their investment, with sluggish consumer and enterprise adoption stalling growth

- VERNIKA AWAL

India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, launched the country's 5G networks at the end of 2022. Since then, in less than two years, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio have launched their 5G services across most circles in India. While the government has been projecting it as the world's fastest 5G rollout at a scale, ministers and stakeholders have also created hype around the technology, underlining its potential advantages in security and latency, but to very limited avail.

Unfortunately, 5G network adoption and monetisation in India are currently at a very preliminary stage, leaving telecom operators struggling to profit from their capital expenditures of over USD 15 billion on infrastructure and spectrum alone.

So, why did 5G not take off as it was meant to?

THE CONSUMER CONUNDRUM

Before understanding enterprises' adoption of 5G, let us break down the consumer conundrum for this technology. In 2022, the cost of a gigabyte of 4G data was just around Rs 10, making India one of the most affordable geographies for Internet services across the world.

While this is good for consumers, telecom operators have found it not to be a great idea for monetising 5G in the country. At the core of the problem is the fact that the current standards of 5G network services do not particularly offer an upgrade in terms of the services that consumers can avail of.

Consumers' primary use cases on mobile networks include streaming over-the-top (OTT) video content to mobile devices such as smartphones. Since 2016, the advent of Reliance Jio in India has ensured that inexpensive mobile data has boosted content streaming in a big way, turning it into a consumer habit and exponentially increasing Internet consumption in the country.