DoT panel's 6 GHz spectrum proposals 'biased': Tech firms

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Department of Telecommunications (DoT) committee on 6 GHz spectrum as «biased» and said the panel itself was one-sided with it originally comprising only telecom industry associations — COAI and GSMA — with no representation from WiFi bodies. In a letter to telecom minister Ashwini Vaishnaw dated August 4, the Broadband India Forum (BIF) — an association of tech players including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Google etc — said after much prodding, it was included as a member, but the tech industry was still in a minority as WiFi industry bodies WBA and Wi-Fi Alliance were denied entry.

While the entry of the WBA and Wi-Fi Alliance was denied because they were global stakeholders, London-based GSMA was allowed to be a part of it, the BIF said. In addition, the report of the committee talks about spectrum needs of only IMT (or 5G services) and does not mention the bandwidth needs of WiFi6E and WiFi7.

«The summarisation of the committee is completely biased. Para 5.3 of the committee report acknowledges the need for an additional 2 GHz of spectrum needs for IMT, based on some propaganda by GSMA.

This is notwithstanding the fact that the committee did not have the mandate to discuss spectrum needs for IMT,» BIF president TV Ramachandran said in the letter. According to the forum, the spectrum needs from new emerging use cases for WiFi were not given due consideration.

«The committee refused to acknowledge that the WiFi community also had presented their spectrum needs requirement of an additional 1200 MHz spectrum in the 6 GHz band,» the letter said. Earlier, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) had written to DoT, stressing that delicensing the 6 GHz band would lead to a loss to the exchequer as the spectrum has