Jio breaks ranks with peers over 6 GHz waves for WiFi

The telecom industry, which was unanimously seeking the entire portion of 6 GHz spectrum for 5G services, is divided on the Centre's decision on delicensing, or allotting without auctions, the lower part of the band for Wi-Fi services.
People aware of the details told ET that
Reliance Jio
, the country's top telecom operator, has reconciled its demands and joined the technology industry in seeking a higher power limit for Wi-Fi devices that can be used under the delicensed spectrum.
Bharti Airtel
and
Vodafone Idea
(Vi) are, however, pushing the government for more deliberations and to form a committee before taking a final decision on spectrum delicensing, they added.
The delicensing will pave the way for deployment of next-generation technologies such as
WiFi
6E and 7 in India and is seen as a big win for tech companies such as Meta, Google, Amazon and Qualcomm, experts said. This was a key demand of the tech industry to meet surging bandwidth needs at affordable rates.
While Jio too was initially against delicensing of the 6 GHz band, it has decided against opposing the government move as the same spectrum can be used for offering fixed wireless services (FWA) using equipment developed in-house. Airtel and Vi however currently do not possess such equipment.
Jio, Airtel and Vi did not respond to queries.
For the past few months, Jio has been using unlicensed band radio (UBR) equipment for providing 5G FWA services utilising the WiFi spectrum. If the Centre agrees to increase the power limits for 6 GHz, the spectrum can be used for FWA as well as WiFi services.
The technology industry wants the power levels permitted for WiFi and other devices to be used under the 6 GHz spectrum band to be reviewed and aligned with global standards, so that users can get the best performances and devices remain affordable.
As per experts, the current power levels proposed by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) may limit the range and throughput of very low power devices. The DoT has proposed a maximum power spectral density (PSD) level of -5 dBm/MHz and total transmit power of 14 dBm for such devices.
The tech industry wants it to be raised to 1 dBm/MHz for very low power indoor and outdoor devices, otherwise it could have a major impact on the performance of Wi-Fi advanced applications such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) collectively, which demand high throughput and latency performance.
Experts say that if the power limits are not increased, it may not allow full utilisation of spectrum. They added that the 6 GHz band can offer data speeds of up to 9.6 gigabits per second (Gbps), against 1.3 Gbps in the 5 GHz band and 600 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz band. Over 84 countries, including the US, UK and South Korea, have already delicensed the 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi services.

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