RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani on Wednesday said that roll-out of 5G should be national priority for the country, adding that the migration from 2G to 4G to 5G should be completed at earliest.
Delivering the virtual keynote address at the inauguration of India Mobile Congress 2021, Ambani said, “To keep millions of Indians at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid confined to 2G is to deprive them of the benefits of the digital revolution.”
Underlining that affordability has been a critical driver of mobile subscription expansion, Ambani said,” India should move towards greater digital inclusion, and not greater digital exclusion.”
“When we talk of affordability in the policy context, we only think of affordability of services. Actually, India needs to ensure affordability not only of services, but also of devices and applications,” he added.
The RIL chairman also stressed the need to complete fibre connectivity and pitched for the adoption of “futuristic technologies and supportive policy tools” like use of the USO fund for purposes other than services.
During the Covid times, Jio was able to introduce Fibre-to-Home to five million homes.
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“If all the players in the industry work together, we can rapidly achieve a nationwide footprint of fibre, just as we reached mobile telephony to every corner of the country in the last decade,” said Ambani.
The 5G technology will represent around 39 per cent of mobile subscriptions in India at the end of 2027, estimated at about 500 million subscriptions, a new Ericsson report said last month.
