Govt eyes 5G rollout by 2020, plans Rs 500-crore fund for support

New Delhi: The government has formed a high-level forum to guide India to start 5G service by 2020, a technology that will deliver wireless broadband speed of about 10,000 mbps in urban areas and 1,000 mbps in rural belts, Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha said on Tuesday.

In a bid to facilitate research and development activities for 5G service rollout, the government is looking at setting up a Rs 500-crore support fund.

"We have created a high-level 5G forum that will work on vision mission and goals of 5G service in the country. When the world will roll out 5G in 2020, I believe India will be at par with them," Sinha said.

The telecom minister announced setting up of a high-level group '5G India 2020 forum' which will be steered by Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan, IT secretary Ajay Kumar Sawhney and Department of Science and Technology Secretary Ashutosh Sharma, along with experts in the tech fields.

Sinha said the country missed an opportunity to have its say in 3G and 4G technologies but now the government wants India to contribute actively in developing 5G standards and products.

"We will make efforts to develop globally competitive products and manufacture them here with a target of getting 50 per cent of India market and 10 per cent of global market over next 5-7 years," Sinha said.

Under the 5G technology, the government aims to deliver about 10,000 megabit per second (10 gbps) in urban areas and 1,000 mbps (1 gbps) in rural areas, he said.

The data transfer in 5G technology has latency or gap of 1 millisecond (ms) compared to 30 ms in case of 4G technology. It can be used for controlling and operating critical devices in the field of medical, self driving cars etc.

"I feel this is a ripe time when India should come forward and take a leap in new technologies. My ministry has initiated it to move ahead with collaborative approach. Earlier efforts were being made in silos," Sinha said.

The government is working on creating a corpus of Rs 500 crore to fund 5G activity, mainly on research and product development, officials said.

As per the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) data, Reliance Jio is providing average 4G speed of around 18 mbps on its network.

The minister said Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development believes that 5G deployment will help increase the GDP of the country and generate employment opportunities.

"The development of 5G technology ecosystem and creation of standards in India will help save payments that Indian companies make at present for using patents of foreign companies," a ministry official said.

The government, academia and industry will jointly work to create enabling environment for manufacturing of 5G chipsets in the country and help Indian firms generate patents in the field and have some essential patents approved in the 5G standard.

The 5G standards are expected to be finalised by the International Telecommunication Union by the mid of the next year.