India’s non-public telecom operators — Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, and Vodafone Concept — have recognized excessive gadget prices as the first barrier to large-scale deployment of 5G RedCap (Diminished Functionality) IoT know-how, regardless of its sturdy potential throughout industrial and business purposes.
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Software program-Pushed, However Not Value-Free
Talking on the ETTelecom 5G Congress 2025, senior executives from the three telcos underscored that RedCap, whereas being a software-led evolution of 5G, nonetheless entails a tool price that makes a number of use instances commercially unviable at current.
In accordance with the report, the telco executives consider that the provision of inexpensive gadgets in giant economies resembling China and India will propel the uptake of the know-how.
“RedCap is actually a software program replace. However that additionally entails a value. So I really feel the deployment will fully depend upon whether or not the price of the gadgets comes all the way down to the extent to be used instances to change into commercially viable,” Siddharth Talawadekar, Vice President and Enterprise Head (IoT) of Airtel Enterprise was quoted as saying within the report. He added that mass adoption will possible be pushed by markets resembling China and India because of their scale and demand. “So it’s a little bit of a rooster and egg story presently.”
Bharti Airtel, together with Ericsson and Qualcomm, performed a pre-commercial RedCap trial on its 5G community in 2023, TelecomTalk beforehand reported.
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5G RedCap
RedCap is designed to assist use instances that lie between high-end 5G purposes and legacy LTE options. It gives comparable information charges to LTE with superior latency, vitality effectivity, and spectrum utilisation, making it perfect for purposes like 4K video surveillance, AR/VR headsets, stock monitoring, and Business 4.0 environments.
Shopper Section Nonetheless a Distant Guess
“So in the present day, price is one angle that’s prohibiting the proliferation of this use case. Nonetheless, RedCap is completely match for industrial automation, darkish factories (which function with out folks), and video surveillance, amongst others,” Mohan Raju, Vice President and Vertical Head (IoT), Reliance Jio, was quoted as saying.
Vodafone Concept’s EVP, Gulshan Khurana, reportedly famous that whereas industrial use instances could drive RedCap adoption, the buyer section will stay restricted until there’s a shift in enterprise economics. “In all probability industrial demand will drive RedCap IoT, however the shopper section not as a lot. I believe the economic necessities, the enterprise dynamics, and the economics must make sense for it to be sensible.”
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GSMA: Standalone 5G Structure Is Essential
Julian Gorman, Head of Asia Pacific at GSMA, emphasised that “5G standalone (SA) structure shall be essential to enabling the RedCap IoT ecosystem. Transferring the entire ecosystem alongside requires the trade to maneuver to that standalone structure, and that shall be an enormous wave to push issues via.
He reportedly added that RedCap IoT remains to be within the growth stage, and has not attained business maturity but. “We anticipate that within the subsequent two to 3 years, the monetary attractiveness of RedCap modules will take over, with the attractiveness of Cat and NB-IoT modules fading away. RedCap IoT will begin to catch up because the extra dominant know-how within the subsequent decade,” Gorman was quoted as saying.
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Market Optimism Rises Regardless of Maturity Gaps
Regardless of the present challenges, trade leaders stay optimistic. “The variety of gadgets on RedCap could be far larger than every other modules as a result of they might be utilized by abnormal folks. So a 7 billion inhabitants could use almost 14 billion gadgets, and this determine might be larger within the subsequent 10 years. This quantity will be monetised in a really optimum method,” Jio‘s Raju reportedly added.
He reportedly said that, regardless of the challenges, the trade may probably unlock vital worth from RedCap IoT know-how via the big quantity of suitable gadgets.
4G/5G Monetisation: Monetising 4G and 5G: Key Takeaways to Date and What’s Subsequent?
“At Counterpoint Analysis, we forecast that by 2030, virtually 17 % of the IoT module shipments shall be on RedCap. Together with the eRedCap, 25 % of the module shipments will occur on these two applied sciences. In India, we’re more likely to see round 10 million shipments by 2030,” Mohit Agrawal, Analysis Director (AI and IoT) at Counterpoint Analysis, who moderated the panel dialogue, was quoted as saying.
