Börje Ekholm, President and Chief Executive, said that the availability of a nationwide 5G network will spur local innovation and entrepreneurship, resulting in new 5G use cases, and helping telecom operators to monetise their network investments.
As per Minister of State for communications Devusinh Chauhan, as on November 24, 2023, 5G networks have been rolled out in 738 districts across the country and a total of 3,94,298 base stations have been installed with around 100 million subscribers using 5G services.
4G continues to be the dominant subscription type driving connectivity and fuelling data growth in the country. However, as subscribers migrate to 5G, 4G subscriptions are forecast to decline from 870 million in 2023 to 390 million by 2029.
"The 5G rollout has been very good. It has set world records with the fastest 5G rollout. But having said that, I m a little constrained to say that the revenues for the telecom industry have not picked up," Kochhar said. He said a huge amount of capital expenditure is being invested to roll out these networks."The private players who are rolling this out definitely expect the return on that. That unfortunately is not happening on the scale as which it should. 5G rollout has brought in 4-5 large entities who are consuming 80 per cent of telecom networks bandwidth but not paying revenue," Kochhar said.