India’s 5G rollout could be modelled after China’s: CLSA

The eagerly awaited 5G rollout in India will resemble China’s deployment strategy, claims the capital market investment firm CLSA.

According to its research, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel’s 5G spectrum in 3.3GHz and 26GHz are equivalent to and even abreast of China’s 5G carriers thanks to the spectrum they purchased over 22 circles in 26GHz. The uptake of 5G services and network rollout between the two Asian economies are expected to follow a number of similar tendencies, according to the analysis. The two biggest mobile markets in the world, China and India, with a total of 2,780 million customers.

The use of spectrum sharing by telecom companies like China Unicom and China Telecom is one of the major advancements in the Chinese telecom industry. They agreed to jointly build and operate a 5G network in 2019, and under that deal, China Unicom would build a larger part of the network’s infrastructure in northern cities and China Telecom will build a larger share in southern cities. Similar to this, CLSA anticipates that 5G might lead to systemic changes like spectrum sharing in India, albeit this wouldn’t be possible for another year following spectrum usage. The report stated that “In the 5G auction, even spectrum trade is permitted, but only after two years from the date of spectrum purchase.”

China’s 2020 rollout of standalone 5G expedited the global transition to the technology. By mid-2022, 5G package consumers had increased to 511 million, or 53% of the overall mobile user base of 967 million people in China, and 5G network customers had increased to 263 million, a twofold increase year over year. Because of increased data consumption since the switch to 5G, the average income per user has increased by 10%.