While it has widely been discussed that the 5G will have radiation impact, the minister turned it down saying there would be hardly any radiation in 5G.
“Odisha will get 5G service in the very first phase. The amount of radiation it will give forth is 10 times less than the radiation norms set by the World Health Organisation (WHO). People should not worry about it,” the Minister said.
Notably, once launched, users will get service at a speed of 10 times more than that of 4G and 30 times more than that of 3G.
According to experts, the speed may reach 100 times. Along with it, the users will no longer face download issue as 5G would enhance the download speed.
For example, the file which took 56 hours for download in 2G network, two hours in 3G network and 40 minutes in 4G network will take only 35 seconds in 5G network. From this it can easily be imagined how fast our digital life is going to be.
5G airwaves worth Rs 1,50,173 crore has been sold so far and the final tally is being prepared by the government, according to sources.
Day six of the 5G spectrum auction on Sunday saw an incremental increase in the bidding figure after 37 rounds, with bids worth Rs 1,50,130 crore.
According to industry analysts, Reliance Jio has placed bids for more than Rs 84,500 crore, while Airtel's bids are worth more than Rs 46,500 crore.
Vodafone Idea has placed bids of around Rs 18,500 crore, while a unit of Adani Enterprises has bids of around Rs 5,000 crore.
Jio and Airtel were fiercely engaged in intense bidding in Uttar Pradesh East circle for the 1800MHz band.
Devroop Dhar, Co-founder and board member, Primus Partners, said the auction stands testimony to the fact that the industry is willing and ready to expand further than ever before.
"That is also the reason behind the key players finally going for the 700MHz bands. The 40 per cent cut down of the bands for Rs 3,927 crore per unit acted as an aid for the bidders," Dhar said.
The expansive 700MHz band is built to cover densely populated regions such as India, which will truly benefit from this band and receive expansive 5G coverage.
"As the bidding has been much higher than the previous auctions, the amount generated will add positively to the revenue and will help the government in the future while setting up the 5G infrastructure," Dhar added.
While Reliance Jio may have an upper hand in terms of bundled handsets and their investments, other industry players also have an opportunity to compete in the industry as according to studies, Indian consumers claim to be willing to pay 50 per cent more for 5G-bundled plans.
"Hence, the companies need to find an incentive to get their customers upgrade to 5G devices," Dhar said.
IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw expects 5G rollout by October this year.
Despite tall claims made by the government, the 5G technology that is gaining momentum fast globally may take at least another 5-6 years to reach the masses in India - for the simple reason that even 5G spectrum allocation is yet to take place for full-fledged trials.
According to IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, spectrum auctions will be held in this calendar year and the trials for 5G services with radiowaves allotted by the ministry will commence in the next 100 day.
This does not sound very promising, if we look at how the things are currently moving.
The entire 5G ecosystem, which involves original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), infrastructure, spectrum and edge devices, is currently missing and in such a scenario, various 5G-enabled devices that are now set to see the light of day are redundant for the Indian consumers.
"We expect 5G to reach mainstream in India in 2023 and mass market starting 2025 or so," said Neil Shah, Research Director at Counterpoint Research.
"This will, however, be much earlier compared to 3G and 4G era which took at least seven to eight years in India since the first global commercialisation for each generation of tech curves," Shah told IANS.
Although India is targeting 2020 for 5G rollout, the country is yet to allocate 5G spectrum to operators even for 5G trial of use cases.
On individual level, 5G trials are slowly picking up with Ericsson, Nokia, Intel and Huawei aiming to invest towards 5G test beds in India.
"The dynamics are completely different now. We have a mature user base, perfect number of operators (three-four) and undergoing digital transformation at the right time beyond smartphones," Shah noted.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), commercial 5G deployments have begun in many regions and while 2019 is very much an introductory year at best, 2020 looks to be the year where 5G begins to ramp up.
IDC expects 5G shipments to reach 8.9 per cent of smartphones shipped in 2020, accounting for 123.5 million devices shipped. This is expected to grow to 28.1 per cent of worldwide smartphone shipments by 2023.
"To be clear, we don't think 5G will be the savior in smartphones, but we do see it as a critical evolution in mobile technology," says Ryan Reith, Programme Vice President with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers.
To fully exploit 5G, a new network topology is required, including new network elements such as edge computing, core network slicing and radio network densification.
Currently, South Korea, China, Japan, Australia and the US are leading with 5G large-scale mass deployment.
When it comes to pricing, it might look different, said Shah, adding that it will be driven by consumption patterns, mostly based on type of content and applications.
A recent Gartner report said that betting big on Internet of Things (IoT)-based communications and video analytics/streaming, nearly two-third of organisations plan to deploy the 5G technology by 2020 but are wary of the lack of readiness of communications service providers (CSPs) in making 5G networks ready by then.
"One major issue that 5G users face is the lack of readiness of communications service providers (CSPs). Their 5G networks are not available or capable enough for the needs of organisations," lamented Sylvain Fabre, Senior Research Director at Gartner.
India has much ground to cover in bringing 5G experience for over 600 million Internet users.