Cost emerges as major impediment to mass market adoption of 5G RedCap IoT: Telcos - ET Telecom (2025)

• Industry
• 3 min read

NEW DELHI: Cost has emerged as the major impediment to the mass market adoption of fifth-generation (5G)-driven Reduced Capability (RedCap) Internet of Things (IoT) technology, according to India’s top telecom operators Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio.

The telco executives, however, believe that the availability of affordable devices in large economies such as China and India will propel the uptake of the technology.

‘RedCap is essentially a software update. But that also involves a cost. So I feel the deployment will completely depend on whether the cost of the devices comes down to the level for use cases to become commercially viable,’ Siddharth Talawadekar, vice president & business head (IoT), Airtel Business, said during a panel discussion at the ETTelecom 5G Congress 2025.

‘That scale-up will happen when the large-scale use cases come in markets like China and India,’ Talawadekar said. ‘So it is a bit of a chicken and egg story currently.’

Notably, the Sunil Mittal-driven telco, along with Swedish Ericsson and Qualcomm Technologies, had in 2023, demonstrated a pre-commercial RedCap technology on its 5G network.

RedCap is an evolution of 5G technology to cater to use cases that are not yet served by the new radio (NR) specifications. Compared to LTE, RedCap offers similar data rates with improved latency, energy and spectrum efficiency, making it suitable for applications like 4K video surveillance, wearables (AR/VR/MR headsets), inventory management, and Industry 4.0 enabled by private 5G.

‘So today, cost is one angle that is prohibiting the proliferation of this use case. However, RedCap is perfectly fit for industrial automation, dark factories (which operate without people), and video surveillance, among others,’ said Mohan Raju, vice president & vertical head (IoT), Reliance Jio.

‘Probably industrial demand will drive RedCap IoT, but the consumer segment not as much. I think the industrial requirements, the business dynamics, and the economics have to make sense for it to be practical,’ Gulshan Khurana, executive vice president (EVP) at Vodafone Idea (Vi) said, echoing similar views as his peers.

Julian Gorman, head of Asia Pacific (APAC) at GSMA, in turn, said that 5G standalone (SA) architecture will be crucial to enabling the RedCap IoT ecosystem. ‘Moving the whole ecosystem along requires the industry to move to that standalone architecture, and that will be a big wave to push things through,’ Gorman said.

He added that RedCap IoT is still in the development stage, and has not attained commercial maturity yet. ‘We expect that in the next two to three years, the financial attractiveness of RedCap modules will take over, with the attractiveness of Cat and NB-IoT modules fading away. RedCap IoT will start to catch up as the more dominant technology in the next decade,’ Gorman said.

Jio’s Raju said that despite the challenges, there could be a huge volume of devices which may enable the industry to optimally monetise the RedCap IoT technology.

‘The number of devices on RedCap would be far higher than any other modules because they would be used by ordinary people. So a 7 billion population may use nearly 14 billion devices, and this figure could be higher in the next 10 years. This volume can be monetised in a very optimal way,’ Raju added.

“At Counterpoint Research, we forecast that by 2030, almost 17% of the IoT module shipments will be on RedCap. Including the eRedCap, 25% of the module shipments will happen on these two technologies. In India, we are likely to see around 10 million shipments by 2030,’ said Mohit Agrawal, research director (AI & IoT), Counterpoint Research, who moderated this panel discussion.

‘In summary, RedCap would be an important technology,’ Agrawal added.

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