Budget 2022: India’s 5G rollout planned for 2022-2023

During the Budget speech for 2022-2023, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that 5G mobile services rollout in the country is going to begin in 2022-2023. She also announced a PLI scheme for 5G services and added that rural broadband is also going to be expanded across the country.

“Spectrum auctions to be conducted in 2022 for 5G rollout in India,” Sitharaman added.

"To enable affordable broadband and mobile service proliferation in rural and remote areas, 5 per cent of annual collections under the universal service obligations fund will be located. This will promote R&D and commercialisation of technologies and solutions,” Sitharaman said.

"Our vision is that all villages and the residents should have the same access to e-services, communication facilities and resources as urban areas and their residents the contracts for laying optical fibre in all villages, including remote areas will be awarded under the Bharat NET project through PPP in 2022-23. Completion is expected in 2025,” the Finance Minister said.

Sitharaman’s announcements regarding 5G rollout aligns with the press release sent by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) in December. The press release stated that 5G rollout in India is going to start in 2022 and 13 cities were going to get it first.

“Costing Rs 224 crore, the project is likely to be completed by December 31, 2021, paving the way for end-to-end testing of 5G (/topic/5g) User Equipments (UEs) and network equipment by 5G (/topic/5g) stakeholders developing 5G (/topic/5g) products/services/use cases, including indigenous start-ups, SMEs, Academia and Industry in the country,” DoT said in the release.

According to the release, the first 13 cities in India to get 5G include, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Gandhinagar, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Jamnagar, Kolkata, Chennai, Lucknow, Pune, Delhi, and Mumbai. More cities are going to be added to the list soon after.

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