Union Budget 2023-24: Govt To Set Up 100 Labs To Develop 5G Use Cases

During her Budget speech, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday (February 1) announced that the government will set up as many as 100 laboratories across the country to develop applications and use cases for 5G.

These labs would be set up in engineering institutions across the country to test out various 5G-enabled use cases.

“100 labs for developing 5G applications will be set up in engineering institutions to realise a new range of opportunities, business models and employment potential. The labs will cover, among others, applications such as smart classrooms, precision farming, intelligent transport systems and healthcare applications,” Sitharaman said in her Budget speech.

The government has been bullish on 5G since the development of the next-gen mobile network started in the late 2010s. India also developed an indigenous network standard, the 5Gi. While 5Gi was approved by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the government faced pushback from telcos and in late 2021, the network standard was merged with the international standard, the 5G NR.

In May 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a 5G Test Bed project for startups, worth more than INR 224 Cr, at the silver jubilee celebrations of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

During the Union Budget 2022-23, Sitharaman announced the 5G spectrum auction. Post the budget announcement, TRAI and the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) organised the auction between the last week of July and the first week of August 2022. The spectrum sale fetched an INR 1.5 Lakh Cr for the government, as Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and Adani Data Networks snapped up 51.24 GHz spectrum across multiple bands.

India witnessed the first 5G networks go live across major metro cities in October 2022. While Airtel launched its network a day before Jio, the latter has taken the lead in terms of rollout coverage.

In its latest financial report, Jio noted that it has rolled out its 5G network across 134 cities and plans to complete the rollout across the country by the end of 2023. At the same time, Airtel has rolled out its next-gen network in 55 cities and also is aiming to complete the rollout by December 2023.