The Adani Group entered the industrial 5G market with high ambitions, but recent reports suggest their efforts have fallen flat. After acquiring 5G mmWave spectrum for $27 million two and a half years ago, they have yet to deploy any private networks. This delay has caught the attention of India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT), which has inquired about the use of the largely idle spectrum and has issued penalties for not meeting rollout targets.
When Adani purchased 400 MHz of 26 GHz spectrum in the 2022 auction, it aimed to create private 5G networks, primarily for their subsidiaries. They also intended to serve enterprise and industrial customers. Chairman Gautam Adani remarked, “The Adani Group’s foray into the industrial 5G space will allow our portfolio companies to offer a set of new add-on services that capitalize on all the other digital segments we are building.”
Initially, Adani’s involvement in the auction stirred speculation about its potential entry into the consumer mobile sector. However, their efforts have stalled, as no deployments have occurred using the mmWave spectrum. Adani now faces financial penalties due to unmet deployment obligations and is considering returning the spectrum licences to the DoT.
Further complicating matters, Adani did not participate in the latest 5G spectrum auction in India, which had a muted response from mobile operators. If they had acquired more spectrum, this could have enhanced their 5G offerings, possibly extending to fixed wireless access services where mmWave excels.
