Don’t load industry with expensive spectrum: Mittal on Trai’s 5G proposals – Times of India

MUMBAI: Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal on Thursday sought “affordable pricing” of 5G spectrum in India, saying that expensive reserve prices for the high-speed airwaves would slow down telecom rollout and modernisation of the digital networks.
Mittal’s comments come days after regulator Trai came out with a set of wide-ranging spectrum auction recommendations where it proposed reserve prices for a record 1 lakh MHz of spectrum for bids.
Mittal said that while 5G and faster digital networks are required in a rapidly-growing economy such as India, affordability is equally important.

“5G is important and that’s why we keep on requesting the government to make the 5G as an enabler for hundreds of things that we develop in the country, to keep the spectrum at affordable pricing, to not load the industry too much,” he said at the Times Network India Economic Conclave.
Instead of spending money on acquiring expensive spectrum, he said that telecom service providers should be enabled to invest for faster rollout of network. “I will say the multiplier impact that a faster, high-speed, low-latency network can have for a country is many times more than what can be achieved by picking up some money upfront.”
Speaking about the proliferation of private and unregulated cryptocurrencies, the Airtel chief said such instruments pose a “serious problem” and backed finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s plea — at a global forum in Washington — for a concerted response.
Mittal, whose company also runs a payments bank, said there are issues around Know Your Customer (KYC) with such currencies, but said that the technology should be protected against harsh actions like a blanket ban.
“…There may be some very hard actions by the nation states to make it (cryptocurrencies) not legal going forward. That needs to be protected. It is a fine technology, it needs to be protected for the use of mankind so they can be safe, very easily traceable type of ecosystem of money, but for that governments need to catch up,” he said.