Digital Desk: The company owned by the wealthiest Indian, Gautam
Adani, announced on Tuesday that the millimetre wave spectrum it had purchased
for 212 crores will be used to build a private network to service its data
centres and enterprises.
In the auction that ended on Monday, Adani Data Networks Ltd
(ADNL), a division of Adani Enterprises Ltd, won the bid for the 20-year use of
400MHz of spectrum in the 26GHz millimetre wave band.
Adani Group intends to use the airwaves for both its data
centres and the mega app it is developing to help industries ranging from gas
retail to ports and electricity delivery to airports.
The Adani group said in a statement that the recently acquired
5G spectrum is "anticipated to help develop an uniform digital platform
that would expedite the pace and scale of the Adani group's digitalisation of
its core infrastructure, primary industrial and B2C business portfolio."
Adani Group's purchase price was a small portion of the
government's received bids of Rs 1.5 lakh crore and it represented less than 1%
of all the spectrum sold in the auction.
The group's larger digital integration strategy includes
building the largest industrial operations cloud in the world, connecting its
data centres through a network of submarine and terrestrial cables, developing
the super app to offer a suite of services across its 400 million consumer
base, and establishing a world-class AI centre of excellence.
The group's first move in integrating its digital infrastructure
portfolio, which includes data centres, terrestrial fibre and submarine cables,
industrial cloud, AI innovation laboratories, cybersecurity, and SuperApps, is
the acquisition of 400MHz of spectrum, according to the statement.
The highest bidder at the spectrum auction was Reliance Jio,
owned by rival billionaire Mukesh Ambani, who took home nearly half of the
airwaves offered. Other significant bidders included telecom tycoon Bharti
Airtel and Vodafone Idea Ltd.
The Adani Group Chairman, Adani, claimed that his
ports-to-energy conglomerate's entry into the industrial 5G market will enable
portfolio firms to provide a set of new add-on services that take use of all
the other digital markets that are being developed.
"We anticipate the next data boom will be more produced by
machines than by people as all devices become connected, given that our
portfolio is a highly distributed asset heavy investment that is all being
revolutionised by sensorization and are rapidly becoming IoT enabled. Other
devices will need to stream, store, process, and analyse this data in
real-time, which will revolutionise every business "said he.
In a nation like India, where Tier 2 and 3 cities are experiencing the highest overall growth, he predicted that this volume will be exponentially bigger and generated at the periphery.
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