The enterprise business chiefs of India’s top two telecom operators Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel reiterated that the enterprises should stick to their core business and leave the work of deploying and managing a captive private wireless network to telcos.
Overview
“I need to make sure that I interface with the device manufacturers, I need to know how to run a telco network, I need to provide security and then create an intercom system…So I’m not really sure what they get out of investing all of it to run a private network,” said Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO, Enterprise Business, Bharti Airtel, in a panel discussion at the ET Telecom 5G Congress 2023.
“I am assuming that there is fair play. They pay for the spectrum as much as we pay. But I’m not really sure even in those circumstances…I just don’t see the business case.”
Globally too, the Airtel executive said, private enterprises deploying their own private network is not a big phenomenon. “…you cannot compare the Indian telco market to anybody else, because we offer the lowest cost of telco compared to anybody else. We are a very unique market in that way.”
End Note
Prateek Pashine, Chief Enterprise Head, Reliance Jio, said even globally, enterprises opt for public 5G infrastructure to realise the benefits of 5G.
“We have the collective expertise of putting up so many towers interfacing with so many device manufacturers because we’re doing it for public 5G… our cost of implementing and servicing of 5G will be much much better than a simple enterprise. That is for sure. We will put in the best private 5G network,” he added.
