The telecom industry defended its hesitancy, noting that local providers were currently facing financial challenges and had limited capacity to invest in new infrastructure.

Vivek Sood, Group CEO of XL’s parent company Axiata, said there was little difference between 4G and 5G connections for individual users given that the main use of connectivity was limited to social media and video streaming apps.

This has raised the question as to whether telecom firms can justify the higher price for 5G connections to compensate their costly investments.

Alternatively, firms could turn to the enterprise market, which is deemed to have higher buying power, but there have been very few use cases of 5G adoption by Asian businesses, except in China, South Korea and Japan.

“The reason for this is that they [corporates] have to invest in software. So they think, okay, I can still work with my old method, why should I put more money in?” Sood said at a media briefing on Thursday.

To fully optimize the technology’s potential, it requires 5G handsets that are more costly than 4G devices, limiting the number of  potential users. That was why, according to Sood, there was no urgency for the firm to push the 5G rollout in Indonesia.