Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently visited the United States of America (USA). Addressing a forum in New York, PM Modi said that India's 5G market has grown bigger than America's 5G market. He stressed the fact that India managed to do this in just two years. To recall, 5G was launched in India on October 1, 2022, at the India Mobile Congress (IMC). The commercial rollouts started taking place a week later.
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PM Modi also said that India is connected today the way it never was. He also said that India is now working on Made in India 6G. While 5G has still not found its footing in the Indian market as it has in the USA in terms of monetisation, the aggressive rollout is indeed impressive. India has more than 4.5 lakh 5G BTS (base transceiver stations).
The availability of affordable 5G phones in the Indian market will help in the fast adoption of high-speed internet services. It is worth noting that telcos are still essentially offering 5G at no additional cost with the 4G plans. The only thing is, that you get 5G with plans that bundle 2GB of daily data or more.
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Vodafone Idea is also looking to launch 5G in the coming quarter or the last quarter of FY25. The next focus for the industry should be to identify use cases that can be monetised on top of 5G. At present, the reason why telcos can't monetise 5G is that it doesn't fulfil any major need of the consumer. As 5G coverage deepens, more use cases will definitely spring up. The telecom operators are currently trying to monetise 5G through the FWA (fixed-wireless access) services. Jio's 5G user base has crossed 130 million while Airtel's base is close to 100 million.
