5G meeting: Govt tells Apple, Samsung to roll out services at the earliest

After a meeting was called by the government on Wednesday, leading smartphone makers Apple and Samsung have said that they were working on 5G handsets and will roll out services after the operators are through with trials and gives the go-ahead.

“We are working with our carrier partners in India to bring the best 5G experience to iPhone users as soon as network validation and testing for quality and performance is completed...5G will be enabled via a software update and will start rolling out to iPhone users in December,” Apple said in a statement.

OTA updates

Most of the smartphone manufacturers have said that they will update their existing products with over-the-air (OTA) programming to update them with software, configuration settings, and even updating encryption keys.

“We have asked the operators as well as phonemakers to update with latest technologies so that 5G rollout can happen at the earliest,” an official privy to the meeting told businessline. Sources also said that the government told Apple and Samsung officials to come out with the the 5G launches at the earliest.

On October 1, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the launch of 5G services in the country. But, while millions of subscribers in India have 5G-ready smartphones, many devices by prominent brands are not supporting the service at present.

Airtel, which is the first TSP to launch 5G services in eight cities, has a few thousand subscribers already and will be adding more in the coming days.

No alert from Vi

Similarly, Reliance Jio has said that it will start rolling out 5G services from Diwali this month. However, Vodafone-Idea has not announced any timeline.

“Samsung has pioneered 5G technology development since 2009 and took the leading role in standardising 5G technology globally. In India, Samsung has the widest portfolio of 5G devices. We are working closely with our operator partners and are committed to rolling out OTA updates across all our 5G devices by mid-November 2022, enabling Indian consumers to experience 5G seamlessly,” a Samsung India spokesperson said.

Similarly, Madhav Sheth, CEO, Realme India had recently said that 85 per cent of Realme devices already support SA and 100 per cent of the devices will have full SA support by October. “We are also rolling out OTA updates for our devices to ensure that all our users can make the most of 5G,” he said.

FOTA updates by Xiaomi

Xiaomi India said that currently, 100 per cent of its 5G smartphone models support the NSA network out of the box, wherein users can choose ‘Prefer 5G’ in network settings to connect to the 5G network.

“Xiaomi has already started rolling out the FOTA updates to select devices like Xiaomi 12 Pro 5G, Mi 11X Pro, Xiaomi 11i, Xiaomi 11i Hypercharge, among others. Most devices will start receiving OTA updates by Diwali. We have 20-plus 5G enabled devices across price points and have shipped 7-million-plus 5G smartphones in India from May 2020 to June this year,” Muralikrishnan B, President, Xiaomi India said.

The high-level meeting that took around 30 minutes, was chaired by Alkesh Kumar Sharma, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Sunil Kumar Singhal, Deputy Director General (Access Services).

Around 30 representatives of TSPs such as Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea and smartphone makers such as Apple, Samsung, Lava, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi attended the meeting.