Airtel conducts first cloud gaming session on 5G
NEW DELHI: Homegrown telecom giant Bharti Airtel has successfully conducted India’s first cloud gaming session in a 5G environment, it said.
Cloud gaming will be one of the “biggest use cases of 5G” as it offers a combination of high speed and low latency internet, Bharti Airtel chief technology officer Randeep Sekhon said. When games are streamed over the cloud, the time taken for data to travel from a server to the user’s device, otherwise called latency, needs to be really low. One of the key benefits of 5G technology is the low latency.
In Airtel’s test, the networks delivered latency in the range of 10 milliseconds and bandwidth of 1 Gbps over the 3,500 MHz spectrum. Airtel used its 5G test lab in Manesar in the national capital region area for the cloud gaming pilot, which also suggests that the industry in India is readying itself to take cloud gaming seriously.
Cloud gaming uses computing power from cloud servers to stream resource intensive games to devices that would otherwise not support such games.
“Future growth will be driven by the internet of things, gaming, smart sports clothing, health gaming, gamification of traditional media, and 5G-led innovations across cloud gaming, crossplatform gaming, and e-commerce gamification, as well as augmented reality and virtual reality (VR) games,” noted a March 2021 report on India’s media and entertainment sector by EY.
Airtel used a game called Asphalt, which doesn’t necessarily need very high computing resources, but the mere fact that the company tested this is significant.
“At a gaming industry level, we’re definitely able to see the future of cloud gaming,” said Rajan Navani, chief executive officer of digital entertainment and technology company JetSynthesys.
“It not only alters the methods in which storage and server movements happen, but also business models tend to change drastically when cloud gaming becomes mainstream. It does not matter which device you are playing on and what the speed is, because you have the cloud and that is where you are playing. The dependency on devices and the cost goes down,” he said.