Accordingly the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in a white paper released said although deployment of the 5G network would require substantial investments, the operators which currently have 4G network would need a lesser amount of investment as they can use their existing 4G infrastructure for 5G services. Meanwhile the white paper named 'Enabling 5G in India' said new operators would require large investments.
It said "Deployment of 5G network will require substantial investment in the core, Radio Network and Spectrum. However, the 5G services will open up many new revenue streams also as it will cater to variety of solutions to new verticals besides enhanced mobile broadband solutions”. TRAI said "Operators with existing 4G footprints will be able to leverage their 4G infrastructure for providing 5G services and hence their investment requirement will be relatively less to establish the network from ground level and therefore would require huge amount of investments”.
When referring to an estimate by Nokia, TRAI said that 5G coverage compared to 4G coverage using 1800 MHz (megahertz) spectrum band would be about 6%. Moreover operators with existing 5G footprints will be able to leverage 4G unified license (UL) coverage through the concept of dual connectivity or UL sharing and hence will be able to cover larger areas with the same number of sites.
