• 5G spectrum has to be priced efficiently, and part of the spectrum needs to be unleashed/unlicensed for WiFi 6 as well as for the private industry.
• India currently spends just about 0.3 per cent of its overall GDP on creating digital infrastructure

Bengaluru: India needs to ramp up its digital spend to at least 1 per cent of its GDP, with an active public-private partnership, if it has to achieve the goals of digital transformation, a senior industry official said.

India currently spends just about 0.3 per cent of its overall GDP on creating digital infrastructure.

“With an annual GDP of close to $3 trillion, India needs to spend much more. Any country of its size spends more than a percentage,” says Anand Agarwal, Group CEO of STL, an integrator of digital networks.

Stating that the investment has to be shared between the public and private sector, he urged the government to do more towards enabling digital transformation.

“Today, public spending on digital is less than 10 per cent of the total spend. And globally we are witnessing this trend where people are realising that digital infrastructure is as important and critical as the physical infrastructure,” he said.

Stating that the shift to digital and creating a world-class infrastructure will require much more than rolling out the platform, Agarwal said, “We have great voice connectivity. But the shift to digital will require us to do much more. The kind of applications that we are creating is extremely data-hungry. They require very low latency. The response needs to be instantaneous. Data needs to be close to the user and require extremely high bandwidth. Therefore there is a need to create a high degree of the spectrum closer to the user, very deep fiberisation and some kind of edge data centre.”

Fibre optic rollout

Stressing on another trending topic on the optimum pricing of the 5G spectrum in India he said, “we have to price it efficiently so that people can roll it out. And part of the spectrum needs to be unleashed/unlicensed for WiFi 6 as well as private networks. These initiatives will help greatly in digitally transforming India,” he said in a webinar.

STL is involved in fibre roll outs and integration of digital networks last week announced a partnership with India’s telecom provider, Bharti Airtel to build a modern optical fibre network for Airtel across 10 telecom circles.

STL says it has been building up its capability to create an ecosystem of partners for ‘Make in India Next-Gen Solutions’.

It recently acquired IDS Group – a data centre design and deployment specialist, invested in ASOCS – a pioneer in virtual Radio Access Networks (vRAN), partnered with VMware – a provider of cloud virtualisation infrastructure, contracted with VVDN – developer of focused radio hardware solutions and aligned with IIT Madras – for research and technical advancements in 5G.

“This will enable self-sufficient indigenous solutions for 5G for all markets,” the company said in a statement.