The Broadband India Forum (BIF) in a statement has discredited the rumours suggesting that the telecom sector will witness a loss in revenues and has said that private 5G captive networks will lead to increased productivity for the enterprises and drive better revenues for the telecom service providers. The president of BIF, T V Ramachandran in a letter to Department of Telecommunications (DoT) secretary, K Rajaraman said that telcos will receive a good portion of the revenue from the private network services which will include voice and data communications.
TRAI’s Recommendations
According to a report from ET Telecom, Ramachandran stated that Captive usage in the current situation would only contribute a minor share in processes/applications like robotics, automation, etc., due to challenges in delivering the required SLAs through public networks. He added that because of this, the speculated loss in revenues for telcos via enterprise services is a misplaced one. The recent recommendations provided by TRAI have been strongly opposed by the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) which represents Jio, Airtel and Vi. COAI has argued that allowing enterprises to set up private networks will kill the 5G business case for them. Recent recommendations from TRAI suggest administrative allocation of the 5G spectrum on demand for private enterprise networks through a publicised online portal-based process. The latest recommendations from TRAI on 5G pricing suggest that private enterprises directly obtain a 5G spectrum from the government and establish their own captive wireless private network (CWPNs), permission/license for which can be acquired via a “light touch’ online portal-based regime.”
