Jio, Airtel, Vi Are Seriously Unhappy, COAI Writes Letter to Ashwini Vaishnaw

The private telcos in India, including Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea (Vi), have been working on 5G for a long-time now. But now, there’s something that threatens all the money spent by the telcos on the R&D (Research and Development) of new products and use-cases relevant to 5G. The government might be considering allocating spectrum to the enterprises in an administrative manner so that they can set up their own captive private networks with the power of 5G. But the telcos are not happy with this development at all.

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COAI Writes to Ashwini Vaishnaw Regarding the Same

On Wednesday, COAI (Cellular Operators Association of India) shared its hard stance on how the spectrum should only be offered through auctions to licensed access service providers. On the same day, the industry body which represents the private telcos had also written a letter to Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister for Communications, on the issue of private captive networks.

COAI said that there would be “no business case for roll out of 5G networks” if enterprises were given spectrum directly. In simple words, COAI means that if the captive private networks are rolled out by enterprises themselves, the telcos won’t have the incentive to invest thousands of crores into spectrum and infrastructure to rollout 5G services as their RoI (return on investment) will not be worth it.

5G use cases demonstrated so far suggest that they are more relevant for the enterprises than the consumers directly. Thus, the telcos are not happy that they won’t have any major benefit from rolling out 5G in the country when their services won’t even be required by the enterprises.

COAI noted that worldwide it had been noticed wherever 5G has been rolled out, the incremental revenues have hardly come from the retail segment. Instead, the incremental revenues have only come from the enterprise segment.