“There is a huge opportunity in front of us. However, spectrum is a big impediment. The current recommended price for spectrum is too high.”

Views on 5G Akhil Gupta,

People also have different views on 5G. Example, it is said that there are no use cases for 5G in India. This particular thinking is quite flawed! India always brings up some use cases, which are never there in the world! It’s also true that once you give technology to the Indian people, they are extremely good at adopting that technology.

5G is actually, not only relevant for India, it is also going to propel us into new ways of doing things. There are experts on spectrum and other standards. Airtel is in the area of creating infrastructure, representing fibre etc. 5G as a technology is really a quantum jump in terms of capabilities, as compared to 4G. It is actually a quantum jump in terms of high speed, hundreds of times data speeds, terabytes and other things. It has the quality of having a very low latency. Many real-time applications can ride on top of 5G. It has high throughput, and therefore, high data, high-speed machine to machine communications.

These attributes of 5G make it extremely suitable for multiple experiences. There is spectral efficiency, network efficiency, etc. It provides significant network performance improvement over the previous generations.

It is expected to also various services across industry verticals. The mobile industry has demonstrated its ability to transform society using 2G, 3G and 4G networks. 5G will build on the successes. It can enable new business models and use cases. There are many use cases of 5G.

Now, the basic goal of 5G is the boundless connectivity for all. That is one part of the innovation and network economics. The mobile industry will strive to have costeffective quality networks, either independently or through sharing. 5G networks will rely on a combination of established and innovative technologies, and use licensed and unlicensed bands. It will revolutionize the mobile broadband experience, drive growth, and produce new use cases for massive, critical IoT.

5G will accelerate digital transformation of the industry. It will provide better user experiences. 5G will actually improve the mobile broadband services. A lot of work has to be done on connecting the towers. In addition to making smartphones better, 5G can usher in new, immersive experience such as AR and VR. There will be faster, more uniform, Internet, lower latency and lower cost. It can also be useful for mission-critical applications and communications. Critical nature of the data requires an accurate class of massive IoT.

Intelligent connectivity is also very important. The networks themselves will be able to self-configure, and provide intelligent connectivity. In our case, fixed wireless access is an important area of enhancing the connectivity experience in the rural areas. Our latest recommendations relating the auction of spectrum: 25MHz should be used to identify applications for Industry 4.0.

What can be done in a limited geographical area of the industry? You can give the license for that particular area to the industry to use and leverage the power of 5G. Areas such as agriculture, manufacturing, I just spoke about, smart care, tele health, smart energy and utilities, smart cities smart education, etc. We are going to have multiple use cases of 5G for our country. We need to collaborate with the enabling environment for 5G. 5G can be used across multiple technology vertical sectors. We need to realize the full potential of 5G by having more supportive policy environment.

The government has been cognizant of the fact. Government can also have an end-to-end 5G test bed to advance innovation and research, a three-year program that began in March 2018. With a project of two-part