India’s 5G dream hit by turf war as ISRO cuts telcos’ power supply

The country’s 5G dream seems to have got grounded even before it could take off as a fallout of a turf war between the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) and the department of telecommunications (DoT), in which the former has gained an upper hand.

The space agency’s view has prevailed and the government’s submission for the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) has accordingly agreed to reduce the power level of the 5G base stations in the 26 GHz spectrum band to eightieth of conventional mobile base stations — the power level of conventional base station is 40 watt whereas the power of 5G stations in this band has been reduced to 0.5 watt.

Reducing the power limit of base stations will exponentially increase the cost of 5G services as the operators will have to put up significantly large number of base stations compared with a conventional mobile system.