News
Huawei’s deputy chairman, Ken Hu, said that spectrum allocation was one of the biggest challenges facing operators in India ahead of their 5G rollouts next year
India’s telecoms regulator must ensure that it allocates contiguous blocks of 5G spectrum on a cost-effective basis, or risk stifling 5G rollout for India’s cash strapped operators, according to senior figures at Huawei.
Speaking to journalists at the Huawei Connect event in Shanghai on Wednesday, Huawei’s deputy chairman, Ken Hu, said that spectrum allocation was one of the key challenges facing Indian operators at present.
“To be specific about India, the first thing to mention is that India is an extremely important market for Huawei in the Asia Pacific region.
“In terms of our expectations of what we hope to hear from the Indian government, we would like to see more spectral resources being made available. We need to see cheaper spectrum resources being released to the Indian carriers.
“We hope that spectrum resources can be allocated more efficiently. It’s very important to have contiguous resources released to carriers in India,” he explained.
Last month, Bharti Airtel’s CEO Gopal Vital claimed that Indian operators would need a total of 1,000MHz of 5G spectrum each for their respective rollouts. He added that the blocks would need to contain at least one hundred contiguous megahertz of C-Band spectrum.
“Indian operators need 1,000MHz of spectrum, each, in order to do 5G properly. There is a lot of work to be done freeing up mmWave spectrum in the high bands. Even when you talk about spectrum in the mid band, the 3.5GHz spectrum, every operator is going to need 75-100MHz of spectrum, otherwise you will see a 5G icon displayed on your phone, but in reality you will just be getting a 4G experience,” he said.
RCom’s subsea division, GCX, files for bankruptcy
