ITU-APT Foundation of India (IAFI) welcomes TRAI 5G spectrum Recommendations

ITU-APT Foundation of India (IAFI) today welcomed the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) 5G spectrum recommendations to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).

Commenting on the development,  Bharat Bhatia, President IAFI said that he is extremely pleased with 50% cut in the reserve price for 700 MHz band and the 35% reserve price of mid-band 5G spectrum in the 3.3-3.7 GHz band from the previous TRAI recommendations. However,he continued,  even now the reserve prices are much higher than what IAFI had recommended in their comments to the TRAI consultation.

Bhatia further added that the IAFI is also pleased with TRAI’s acceptance of our proposal for Option B1 for the new 600 MHz of 40+40 MHz, an IAFI recommendation that was already accepted by the APT - Asia Pacific Telecommunity, the Asia Pacific regional telecom organization at its 29^th AWG meeting in March this year.  IAFI led the regional consultations among the Asian countries to finalize a harmonized band plan for the APT and had recommended that option B1 be the APT band plan for this new 600 MHz band.

IAFI is also pleased that the TRAI recommendation to auction the new 40+40 MHz spectrum in 600 MHz APT band along with 30+30 MHz in 700 MHz APT band is expected to provide enough UHF spectrum for mobile operators. These two bands are crucial for the rollout of 4G/5G services in rural and suburban areas as well as to enhance indoor coverage in major cities, and are expected to resolve many call drop issues. However, IAFI would have liked the 600 MHz band reserve price to be somewhat lower than that of 700 MHz due to extensive ecosystem availability for the 700 MHz  3GPP band 28.

IAFI is also very pleased with the recommendation to create necessary enabling provision for the enterprises to obtain 4G/5G spectrum on lease from TSPs or to obtain the spectrum directly from the government and establish their own  Captive Wireless Private Network for which a very light touch online portal-based regime for acquiring permission/license for ‘Captive Wireless Private Network (CWPN)’ has been recommended.  IAFI also welcomed the suggestion of earmarking 40 MHz each in 3700-3800 MHz band 4800-4990 MHz for private captive network. IAFI is actively working on CWPN in ITU-R and APT - AWG.

Further IAFI, also welcomed the proposal of TRAI to reduce the mid band prices to 35%. However, these are still 2 to 5 times higher than in other countries such as UK, Germany and Korea and would like to request DOT to further reduce the same by about 50%.