This year has shown that the telecom industry is the foundational industry. It is emerging as a supreme, foundational industry because every other industry is now relying on telecom. Therefore, it has now become a horizontal (market). The 5G proliferation in India has been the fastest in the world; the data rates are growing, subscriber acquisitions are increasing and so is privatisation. Overall, the year has been very good for telecom in the sense that outreach has increased, activity on telecom has increased.

The worries remain around revenues and ROIs. Those are being addressed. So overall, if you ask me, I think it has been a good year.

Whenever we deploy a new technology, there are two or three things which are essential. One is the wherewithal – to roll out the networks and to implement that spectrum. Scientifically, it has been proven that in India, we require 2GHz of spectrum in the mid-band to roll out effective 5G networks. Unfortunately, we have got just about 800 MHz of spectrum, which gives us a deficient of about 1,200 MHz. That is something that will cause a lot of problems going forward.

Secondly, we require fiberisation for which we require a sound right of way (RoW) policy so that there are no impediments in rolling out the fiber.

Earlier, the things which were semi-automated or done manually, will now get fully automated and we will have improvements in the network usage and in the efficiency of the networks. This has already started happening as far as embedded AI is concerned. As far as generative AI is concerned, it will benefit the businesses which are growing on 5G platforms, and those will come out with innovative applications, which are specific to their verticals and which can generate more profit for them at a lesser cost.