It has been more than a year since 5G services were rolled out to users in India with Reliance Jio and Airtel leading the charge. While 5G adoption hasn’t really hit its peak, Reliance Jio believes that it is time 2G, 3G services should be shut down by the government, according to a report by The Economic Times. It is something that one of the other major telecom provider also agrees with Reliance Jio.
In its response to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)’s consultation paper on ‘Digital Transformation through 5G Ecosystem’, Reliance Jio said, “The government should come out with a policy and glidepath for closing down the 2G and 3G networks completely so that unnecessary network costs should be avoided, and all customers can be migrated to 4G and 5G services. This will also give great impetus to developing ecosystem to 5G use cases.”
Interestingly, Jio doesn’t have 2G services whereas both Airtel and Vodafone-Idea (Vi) do have. Vi also wants government to make efforts to ensure migration of 2G users to 5G. “A substantial part of the citizens in the country are generally using older technology i.e. 2G and are not able to access the new generation technology i.e. 4G and 5G despite availability of connectivity,” Vi said, as per the report by The Economic Times.
One of the reasons Vi is giving is that users are unable to switch to smartphones as they are an expensive proposition for them. “Such barriers further increase digital divide as well as would also impact ecosystem for 5G use cases and thus need a concerted effort and push from the government to get resolved,” Vi said.