The government saw record-breaking sales of 1.45 lakh crore on Tuesday, the first day of the 5G spectrum auction. This amount is much higher than sales in 2015 of 1.1 lakh crore. The highly desired high-speed network is expected to roll over in top cities in India from September-October.
The auction for the 5G spectrum was expected to be concluded on Wednesday with not many changes in the overall collection. The event saw a massive relief in the packages given to the telecom industry, which was battling financial stress and high debt in previous times
“The swashbuckling response has shown that all previous records achieved in the spectrum sale will be broken. We expect 5G services to begin later this year, and this will result in fresh investments, new jobs and much better quality of services in the telecom sector,” said Ashwini Vaishnaw, Communications and IT Minister.
The most significant contribution in collections is expected from Reliance Jio, followed by Airtel Bharti and Vodafone Idea. Besides this, newly entered Gautam Adani had gone for a modest opening in his telecom debut ━ that he would enter in the enterprise space, not consumer mobility.
“The government had put a total of 72GHz of the spectrum on sale, worth at least Rs 4.4 lakh crore, just at the reserved time, though the market was not expecting the high pitch battle and heavy buying due to the abundance of the airwaves. The government is hoping to wrap up the sale this week and complete post-sale official formalities before 15 August”, according to Vaishnaw.
“We are hoping to launch 5G services for the common people across many key cities such as Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, etc. by September-October this year. This will be a huge upgrade to India’s telecom ecosystem”, said Ashwini.
5G would bring a huge change in different sections and improve the customer experience.