The head of the GSMA has urged India's mobile industry to explore 5G network slicing as a way to deliver more tailored services to consumers and enterprise customers, in remarks reported by CNBC TV18.

Network slicing is a 5G capability that allows a mobile operator to partition a single physical network into multiple virtual sub-networks. Each slice can carry its own performance profile — low latency for industrial automation, high throughput for video distribution, or low power consumption for sensors — and its own service-level agreement and price. The feature is part of the 3GPP 5G standard and depends on a 5G core network with orchestration software to manage slice lifecycles.

What is the GSMA recommending?

The GSMA chief's message, as reported by CNBC TV18, is that Indian operators should move beyond uniform consumer broadband and use slicing to package 5G as a set of differentiated products. That includes guaranteed-bandwidth links for hospitals, private network slices for factories, low-latency connections for cloud gaming, or constrained-bandwidth slices for large-scale IoT. Each product could be sold on its own commercial terms, opening a second revenue stream alongside retail mobile.

The recommendation also signals that the industry body views enterprise and vertical-specific services as essential to monetising 5G investment, rather than relying on consumer pricing alone in a market where average revenue per user has historically been low.

What does network slicing require technically?

Slicing depends on a 5G standalone core with a service-based architecture and orchestration software that allocates resources across slices in real time. Indian operators have so far rolled out 5G largely on non-standalone architectures, which pair 5G radio with a 4G core. Standalone 5G, the prerequisite for dynamic slicing, sits at an earlier stage of deployment.

Device support for explicit network-slicing features remains uneven across the 5G handset market, and Indian carriers have limited experience selling managed network products to large enterprise customers at scale. Billing and operational systems also need retooling to charge different customers different rates for what is, in radio terms, the same physical signal.

The GSMA separately publishes a generic slice template that standardises how operators describe and order slices regardless of vendor, an effort to make the technology interoperable across borders and reduce vendor lock-in for multinational enterprise customers.

What stands in the way of commercial deployment?

Three constraints sit between the GSMA's recommendation and commercial network slicing in India: the capex required for standalone core migration, the maturity of the device ecosystem, and the operational gap between consumer SIM sales and enterprise managed-service contracts.

Indian operators have invested heavily in 5G spectrum and infrastructure since commercial launches began, and the GSMA's push suggests the industry body sees enterprise revenue as the missing piece of the commercial case. Carriers will need to decide whether to fund slicing capability themselves, partner with system integrators, or wait for clearer demand signals from large enterprise customers before committing capital.

What happens next?

The CNBC TV18 report did not name any Indian operator that has committed to a slicing roadmap, specify a trial or commercial launch timeline, or detail any regulatory engagement with the Department of Telecommunications. The GSMA chief's remarks nonetheless add weight to ongoing industry conversations about how 5G capex can be converted into enterprise and vertical revenue, and the next concrete signal is likely to come when Indian operators disclose standalone core migration plans in their next quarterly results.