Jio calls for lower 5G spectrum base price

Reliance Jio Infocomm has called for a ‘critical look’ at the price of 5G spectrum which need to be revised, else it would delay launch of the next generations networks. The company also urged the government to make airwaves available to telcos in between auctions, at the previously discovered price.

“The prices of 5G spectrum need to be critically relooked at. Higher floor prices will lead to 5G networks being unviable and therefore getting delayed,” Mahendra Nahata, Director on board of Jio said while addressing the inaugural session at the India Mobile Congress on Monday.

He added that, an equilibrium therefore, need to be established between government revenue and overall growth. This is the first time the company has publicly backed a reduction in the price of the critical airwaves, thus joining Airtel and Vodafone Idea in their plea to the government to reduce the price of 5G bandwidth.

At present, the telecom regulator has priced the airwaves at around Rs 50,000 crore for 100 Mhz of pan India 5G spectrum, Rs492 crore per MHz of airwaves in the 3300-3600 Mhz band.

Highlighting how the launch of Jio had contributed to the proliferation of digital services across the country, Nahata said that last 3 years in particular had been a feather in the cap of telecom sector where voice traffic had migrated to data traffic.

“Today within a short span of 3 years, India ranks number one in mobile data consumption in the world. In the last 3 years the data usage price has come down to Rs.10 per GB from a level of Rs.500 per GB which has made data usage affordable even to the economically weaker section of the society,” he highlighted.

However, he said such massive explosion further increased the requirement of additional bandwidth for the telecom operators, the government needed to make spectrum available to telcos on a timely basis.

“Government would need to have a clear road map for timely availability of spectrum. The long delays between the spectrum auctions should end. Moreover, spectrum should be made continuously available to the industry between the two auctions at the price determined during the last auction,” Nahata said.

Noting the role of Reliance Jio in the digitization of the country he said, “Reliance Jio has played stellar role in this market transformation by investing more than 50 billion dollar towards creating state of the art 4G infrastructure across India with largest optical fibre footprint. The populace, still considered unworthy of data services by others, has been provided with the hi- speed wireless broadband services.”