By Rajiv Khattar

With the 5G spectrum auction over and the Indian government having generated a good amount of revenue, now the telcom companies are gearing up to launch their services — both Airtel and Reliance Jio have publicly stated they would soon make formal announcements on the launch.

The distribution platform operators (DPOs) need to take care that they are sufficiently protected from the interferences from the 5G services as the mid band transmissions are very close to the downlink frequencies at the level of their headends.

Currently, the telecom companies have been given frequencies in the range of 3630 Mhz and shortly the frequencies up to 3670 will be used for the 5G services. The downlink of the TV signals start at 3700Mhz at the headends and, thus, the likelihood of  interferences at the headends’ level is high.

Bandpass filters are a critical device to mitigate the risk of interference as it filters unwanted frequencies. Telecom Engineering Consultants, which is the technical wing of the Department of Telecoms, has released the generic specifications of the bandpass filters (TEC Standard No57030:2022 ) that will help address possible interferences.

DPOs, while procuring the bandpass filters, should take care of the specifications and need to ensure that their ‘receive antennas’ are well tuned.

Presently, there is no indigenous manufacturer of the bandpass filters and the demand will have to be fulfilled by imports.

It will be great and well worth it, if the government extends some financial incentives to DPOs from the spectrum auction earnings in procurement of bandpass filters. The reason for such incentives make sense as the broadcast stakeholders would have to make substantial investments in procuring bandpass filters. Some sort of duty exemptions on imports of these filters would be most welcome.

(Rajiv Khattar, the author, is a media industry veteran and a consultant, specializing in tech and satellite matters. His last assignment was as the South Asia head for a global satellite company, ABS. Before that he spent almost two decades with the Zee group in various leadership positions in Siti Cable [now Siti Networks] and Dish TV. In between, for a short while he also did a stint at Reliance Industries’ media unit. The views expressed are those of the author and Indianbroadcastingworld.com is not responsible for them, nor subscribes to them.)