Tech and telecom equipment companies seek 6 GHz band delicensing

Broadband India Forum has pushed for the key mid band to be kept open for Wi-Fi services

The Broadband India Forum (BIF), which represents tech majors like Google, Meta and Microsoft, and telecom equipment makers such as Ericsson, Cisco and Huawei, has pushed for the 6 GHz mid band to be delicensed, thereby opening it up for Wi-Fi in India.

At an industry event hosted by it on Tuesday, BIF pointed to next-generation Wi-Fi technologies such as Wi-Fi 6E and the upcoming Wi-Fi 7 that work exclusively in the delicensed 6 Ghz spectrum band, as key solutions that would complement 5G in India.

The government is in the process of deciding which sector to reserve the spectrum for. A committee formed under the Wireless Planning and Coordination Wing of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is considering the issue.

Delicensing a band would assign it to every citizen for non-exclusive usage subject to minimal regulatory constraints. It would mean that operators, consumers and anyone else would not need any permission from the telecom regulator for connecting laptops and smartphones to it.

BIF has pitched Wi-Fi as a key additional capacity that is required to complement mobile broadband beyond 5G for end users.

“The unlicensed usage of this band would increase its flexibility significantly from the point of view of using the latest technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality,” Parag Kar, vice-president at BIF and vice-president, government affairs, India and South Asia at Qualcomm, said at the event.

“BIF has conducted a very exhaustive study for co-existence in the 6GHz band based on actual data, which has conclusively proved that Wi-Fi can co-exist with incumbent users of fixed services (FS) and fixed satellite services (FSS) in the band,” said T V Ramachandran, president, BIF.

It shows that radio local area networks or RLAN (Wi-Fi) operations in India for all three RLAN device classes — low power indoor (LPI), standard power (SP) and very low power (VLP) — in the entire 6 GHz band (5925-7125 MHz) will not cause any harmful interference to the services in question.

Fight for spectrum

A simmering fight over who will get access to the 6 GHz band is now heating up, with telecom companies repeatedly demanding access to it. The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has written to the telecom secretary arguing that at least 1200 MHz of spectrum needs to be allocated for mobile communications in India in the band.

Currently, only 720 MHz is available in the mid band in India, it said. COAI maintains that 6 GHz is ideal for the commercial success and deployment of 5G New Radio, the global standard for a unified 5G wireless air interface, and 5.5G, the next level in the current 5G network, along with 6G in the future.

This is since mid bands provide a balance of wide coverage and capacity that is critical to the rapid and cost-efficient deployment of 5G.

While BIF claims the licensing of the band to telecom operators for 5G deployment will effectively limit it to outdoor uses, the telecom companies have advanced the same argument to demand more access to it.

For higher advanced tech like 5G and 6G, spectrum requirements shift to higher bands like millimeter wave, which have greater capacities to carry data but lack coverage reach since they can be effectively transmitted over a smaller range.

In essence, telecom firms say they would need to erect more towers and radios in urban areas without access to enough 6 GHz bands.

But BIF says that since separate base stations would need to be deployed because the signal penetration would be low indoors, Wi-Fi can be a powerful alternative.