With 5G, Operators can Deliver Existing Services Far Better and Add New Services, at Lower Cost

—Durga Malladi SVP & MD, 4G/5G, Qualcomm

Globally, there is a lot of hype and noise about 5G. Can you tell us about its tangible and measurable benefits, and the need to shift from 4G to 5G?

For those of us who’ve seen its development and adoption so far, it’s important to understand that 5G is not just hype. After the beginning stages, when they laid the foundation of 5G it is clear that 5G will transform new applications and new industries that have never really experienced or used the wireless technology before. This is the first time that they’re doing it.

We already have 1-2GB/sec 4G devices in the market. How will the 5GB/sec or more kind of devices benefit the end users?

While 5G enhances the mobile broadband, it also has the ability to reduce latency dramatically down to one millisecond. The typical use cases linked to it are not necessarily linked to smart phones. Sometimes they do, but mostly they are linked to other applications like factory automation, industrial IoT, mission critical applications and even (Extended Reality) XR glasses, where latency matters quite a bit when you’re in an interactive environment. The third aspect is its ultra-reliability. It’s the ability to replace wireline communication with wireless. There are a lot of areas where one can improve the overall efficiency of the process if you transfer from wireline to wireless.

It’s important to know that when we go with the mobile broadband and 5G, it is not just about the peak data rates. Yes, the peak data rates are higher, but it’s a lot more about the average and the guaranteed data rate. For instance, in the US my 4G smartphone gives me less than 50Mb data rate on an average. But 5G is all about a significant improvement in the average data rate and the guaranteed data rates which are much higher. Imagine if you were walking around and the 5G peak data rate is 5 GB/sec, the 4G data rate is between 1-2 GB/sec, so it maybe a 2x or 2.5x increase. But on an average, depending upon the circumstances, you may reach close to 500MB/sec and your guaranteed minimum is going to be something like 100-150MB/sec. That’s the real promise of 5G. Once you do that, it’s obvious that all the applications will not be confined within just a smartphone. It could be in laptops, in fixed wireless applications where you start replacing for the last mile bottleneck, like you bring in CP equipments which can be mounted outdoors. There are a lot of applications which come in there.

But how will such high average data rate on a smartphone help? What are we going to get with it?

People are interested in video and it still remains the most dominant application on a smartphone. The fraction of time that you see a 4k video in its native format increases dramatically in our simulations of some of the early result that we’re seeing in the field. You actually go up to more than 90% of the time and can see a 4k video in its natural resolution, compared to less than 10% of the time. That’s something that you can immediately observe. Second, one gets a very high download speed, up to 20x on an average. These are the early tangible benefits of 5G mobile broadband, but the real benefit of 5G is way beyond that, in manufacturing plants, networks, and automobiles.

Are you suggesting that 5G is not so much for the consumers as it is for the enterprise applications?

From an end user’s standpoint, response of the system is so good that you can actually feel it. It may not make much difference for email, text message or Whatsapp, but if you start thinking of video applications, the end user can feel the difference. But there is something else that I should mention. Today, 5G has been deployed in six regions of the world. In the US, several countries in Europe, Australia, Korea, and China 5G has come up in a very big way and Japan just started a commercial service. There are more than 30 operators in the world. What has compelled these operators to go to 5G is the fact that the throughput is so high that the cost for the operators becomes significantly lower. So it’s far more efficient for them to give the 5G service as compared to 4G.

This is a good reason for mobile operators to take step in that direction. End users get a much better experience even if they’re downloading videos. I know that the rates in India are pretty low but very rarely do operators outside

India offer large amount of data. Unlimited data plans are a rarity outside India. With 5G, unlimited data plans are becoming a reality outside India too.

In Korea, with 5G subscription they can offer 50 GB a month for the same price. If they pay 110 dollars, they can get unlimited plans there. That is another incentive. When you start using it, you take the wireless connectivity for granted you don’t think about how to run data plans. So, these are very interesting emerging trends and remember they’re only into their sixth month of the launch of 5G.

We keep hearing about the security aspect, especially since now it’s not just about the smartphones but a vast range of products and gadgets that will get connected. Is that a cause of concern?

Let me start with security because it’s an important aspect. Basically, security in cell phones has been connected to the data in the SIM card. All the information about you is saved in that SIM card. If you change your SIM card, it becomes a different profile altogether. Over time we gradually moved from physical SIMs to embedded SIM cards and then eventually integrated SIM cards, which are the secure zones that make it far more effective. There is one trajectory that has been used because it’s easy. You’ll find today that in dual SIM devices, one is a physical SIM and another embedded. There is another transition and network evolution related to 5G that’s occurring. This is known as disambiguation of RAM. What it really means is that today you have these security credentials that are stored in multiple locations in the network. One of the ways of making sure that even the network level security exists in every device is the industrial standard module, which has to be adopted, so that no one can go and tap into the data. In the network, the disambiguation of RAM or virtual RAM, instead of base stations, you have remote radio heads. Behind the radio there may be 10 different sites where the base band crosses and just manages things around.

Actually it’s a far more seamless user experience. It’s not the case of handling one set or the other; there is just one set; there are different radio heads. Behind that centralised space band processor, you have to protocol that processor. By the time they head into the core network a lot of security credentials are maintained, that would be completely separate somewhere else. Our part of what can be done from the technology standpoint is to make sure that there are ways of maintaining security. These can be different kinds of security. It’s not necessarily the mobile broadband. Tomorrow it can be the national electricity grid. You have these substations where you have the antennae, but you don’t store your credentials, which will be in a completely different location. That is based upon the socialisation of RAM. It’s always something that we have to monitor and there has to be the adoption of network topology as well. But the industry is not treating security as an afterthought. It has always been important right from the outset.

It’s being said that mm waves have limits and will work in some places, perhaps only dense areas, and not everywhere. Can you throw some light on this?

Most of the industry was very sceptical about this. We too were sceptical but as we started solving one problem after the other, we realised that it had a lot of potential. First, these waves have been used in fixed backhaul links, not for mobile communications. Now we’re seeing their deployment for mobile communications. In my building, my data rate can be anywhere between 1-2 GB/sec, even when I’m not standing right below the base station. One narrative that people used to have is that maybe it’s only intended for these dense urban areas. In fact these days we’re spending a lot of time on fixed wireless as well to make sure that we can have nationwide broadband capability. We have done some case studies. We took the rural areas in US, Europe, in Australia and we’re beginning to do it for China and India as well. It turns out that using fixed wireless with these mm waves in rural areas has huge potential.

The ability to provide multiple 10s, if not 100s MB/sec, around the world actually has tremendous promise for the rural areas. That’s the reason why we believe in it. We have done our homework on what can be done. What we have now is high power CPU solutions which you can mount outside. It allows us to get much higher data rates in these rural areas, significantly higher than you can ever go with 4G. It’s taking off very nicely in other parts of the world and there’s a lot of traction for it. We want to make sure that in India too everyone understands this. I’d classify this as the sixth myth of mm waves, i.e., somehow the mm waves are only for dense urban areas or only for cities, not for rural areas. That’s not true. We believe that it’s actually for a lot of other regions, including rural areas for fixed wireless services.

Is 5G more about software than hardware and therefore, deployment will be less expensive, faster, and less complicated?

Traditionally, if you’re a handset OEM and you procure

a base band modem, and then you can split it between a base band, a transceiver and a handset. You may have to optimise each one of these independently. But, even if each one is optimised, the sum of multiple parts together is not necessarily optimised. So, we have focused on it as a system level solution. The system is jointly optimised together. When we do it that way, first of all we extract maximum value out of it. You get the best performance. Second, because these are integrated solutions, these are also turnkey solutions for an OEM. As an OEM, I buy just the modules and integrate them together.

This makes 5G less complicated. We have taken that approach, of integrating our modem in a much more efficient manner. So, I don’t want to say that it’s all about software. I don’t want to diminish the amount of complexity that is involved in our system. But we have taken the burden of simplifying the ecosystem. There is a lot of additional software added to the system, so I won’t say that it’s one or the other. The answer is absolutely yes, it’s faster and easier to migrate from 4G to 5G, based on what we’ve seen this year.

We have been told about the ability of 5G to handle diverse and expanded range of connectivity requirements. Can you elaborate upon this?

When we think of cellular networks and cell phones, we usually focus on one dimension. That is the data rate. Earlier we used to focus on voice quality, but now we focus upon the speed of the network. That comes under the general category of capacity, coverage and speed. If we take a look at the kind of performance we envision for 5G, we lead into a lot of industries where we had never ventured with cellular before. Their requirements are not so much of speed; their requirements are in other domains. One of them happens to be latency. If you’re using a controlled wireline system today, you need a highly responsive system out there. If we want to replace the wireline communication, there are lots of reasons for it.

If you want a response time of less than 1 millisecond, you need a faster network. It’s not related to your smartphone, but to the network. A lot of work remains to be done in the field of 5G, but speedy response is important. Reliability is another metric. This means that during transmission of data, even a millisecond of data should not be missed. When this happens, you may want to replace the wire, but in reality, it’s always the lag. Once again it’s a new dimension, very different from what’s needed in a smartphone. We should keep in mind that we’ve only done the first version of it. It’s a decade ahead. But we’ve laid the foundation in a right way. All these new services can be built on top of it.

Do you think Indian operators are ready to deploy 5G?

I’ll answer this question in two different ways. One is, from a pure technological standpoint, according to which I feel there’s nothing stopping an operator from deploying it. If you take a look at the radio access network or the overall infrastructure community, everyone has deployed it in multiple regions, so it’s a very rich ecosystem out there. Similarly, devices are ready. We have enabled more than 30 OEMs with their smartphones, routers etc. They have deployed 5G in other parts of the world. The ecosystem is ready.

There is another angle to it and that is the spectrum available to the operators and usually the spectrum is auctioned over there. If someone already has the spectrum and wants to launch but is worried about the scale of the launch or about the constrained capital etc, in this case the negotiations occur behind the scene. Very similar concerns were raised when we were launching 5G in 2019 and the way we ended up launching across the world was

“It’s far more economical for operators to deliver services with 5G as the cost is significantly lower.”

to rely upon the existing 4G sites. We used the 5G new radio while keeping the same 4G core. That made it easier for the operators to take the first step in deployment. The second step is to go for only 5G without combining with 4G, but it was an easy step to take. I think spectrum availability is going to be more of a question mark. There are other ways of doing it. We have been promoting a concept called dynamic spectrum sharing. Outside India it’s happening but in India it’s a different story.

Is the challenge in terms of erecting new towers likely to come in the way of deploying 5G and finally the quality of service that is delivered?

If the question is whether we need additional sites for 5G to get started and deliver good service, then we are actually adding 5G radio on a range of 4G sites. If you mean that we don’t have enough sites and we need more sites, then, yes that might be the case, but we can get started with what we have. If the question is about the need for more sites, the answer is yes in the Indian context. If you look at 4G footprints, then you need more sites, but I’m not sure if that’s going to happen. All I am saying is that the power for launching 5G is in the air. It doesn’t have to be a question like how many 4G sites there are, but it should generate a willingness in the operator to utilise whatever 4G sites are already there. That’s an option that has never existed before.

So what should the government do to speed up the 5G deployment in India?

We work closely with the Government of India at all levels. The general expectation is that it would be good to have additional spectrum. The sooner the spectrum auction process starts, the better. It’s always the first step towards deployment. Secondly, when we take a look at how the spectrum has been auctioned around the world, whether it’s in the US or whether it’s in Europe – in places like Japan and Korea they simply allocate the spectrum – the spectrum auction has to be a combination of bands that are below 6 Ghz; something like 3.5 Ghz and the millimetre wave band of 26 GHz, 28 GHz and so on. For example, in the US, we have 24, 25, 28 and 29 GHz, while in Japan they allocated 26 GHz band. The same happened in Korea and in Russia as well.

Italy went through the auction process. Again they have the 26 GHz band. In Europe they have 3.5 and 26 GHz. In general I would say that regulators and governments of these countries have made sure that there is a broad mindset of keeping a perspective that you need a healthy combination of below 6 GHz bands which have served well for cellular communication for a very long time; and millimetre waves of 26, 28 and 29, which can bring extremely high capacity of the network, much needed for mobile broadband services. That can be a huge relief in our opinion. So we need a mix and match of both.

By when do you expect commercial deployment of 5G in India?

It’s hard for me to speculate when commercial 5G can be launched in India. It’s a question best answered by the mobile operators.

What is status of 5G handsets in the market? We often hear handsets are not available.

From the trendline perspective, the diversity of 5G has increased tremendously. There are lots of new entrants in the premium tier market. For instance we have Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi and One Plus. They have all adopted our Qualcomm solutions. They have launched 5G outside China. For instance in Europe, Australia, we see a lot of new vendors. It’s a new trend. This is in conjunction with all the other existing OEMs. You have the existing vendors along with a new set of vendors. If you take a look at the industrial designs for the handsets, we have seen very innovative and interesting ideas.

These are all 5G so they come with a combination of millimetre waves in the US and the subsist tech in other parts of the world, and now we see mm waves in other parts of the world as well. The likes of Sony, Sharp and Fujitsu are also launching in Japan. It’s a very complicated technology which relies upon everything that we learnt over the past 10 years in 4G as well.

What has been your experience and learning working with operators as they moved from trials to commercial launch?

We’ve gone way beyond learning and trials. We have had commercial launches. Demos and trials are now occurring in regions where trials have not been launched. In the beginning of any G, there are some nervousness and concerns on how it is going to work. I’d say that by and large the feedback from the industry has been surprisingly well. Actually the transition from 4G to 5G in these markets went well. People still say that they don’t have enough coverage, maybe there would be only a few cities with 5G, or in the cities just a few blocks here and there, but the truth is that 5G transition went smoothly. The industry in general was pleasantly surprised.

The second point is that we’ve heard all about the number of myths associated with mm waves. People used to say there was no way it was going to work in a handset, you can’t move around with it, you can’t catch a handset and move around, you have to stand below a tower etc. Every single one myth of these kinds has been systematically demolished. We are with major operators who’ve launched mm waves in the US and the beginnings of it in other countries as well in Europe and Japan. Mm wave is for real in a smartphone. It works amazingly well. Every analyst who used to questions it, after seeing the technology, would agree that it will work. Those around the world who are used to thinking that somehow mm wave will not work, are way back.

“Regulators and governments have to make sure that there is a healthy combination of below 6 Ghz bands and millimetre waves of 26, 28 and 29, which can bring extremely high capacity of the network, much needed for mobile broadband.”

Among the enterprise users, which vertical do you think would be the early 5G adopter?

We are already beginning to see the earliest adoption. The laptop OEMs have picked up 5G as the in-built technology as part of their laptop. Usually when you join a company, you’re given a phone perhaps and you’re given a laptop. Phone is paid for by the company and the laptops usually have just Wi-Fi. When you have that laptop with 5G, it becomes somewhat different because when you think of it, most of us are far more interested in keeping our data in the cloud. Most importantly you want things to be portable in your tablet, your handset and in your laptop, which means that there needs to be ubiquitous connectivity even in your laptop. Your laptops have to be constantly tethered to the cloud, and 5G is the best way to do it. With 5G you get all those pieces that are necessary to constantly back up and fetch the necessary components.

It was right there in your laptop, it was just that it wasn’t user-friendly to get quickly. Because the capacity of 5G is so high, what your data plan offering is significantly better. Because the cost for a mobile network operator is much lower. So, the enterprise networks, CIOs of large corporations, who are just interested in re-thinking about the way they get to control the network even if others are running it to connect all their employees. It’s a B2B relationship between the enterprise networks and mobile operators. CIO of a company would like to think of it as a 5G private network. The mobile operator would like to think of it as a network that has a private slice associated with it. You start seeing the concept of network slicing coming over there. This is a very interesting case and we’re seeing it as one of the earliest network concepts.

What about the popular 5G-based applications for the consumer market?

I’m a big believer in the combination of XR that is, fragmented and virtual reality. I’m beginning to see that mobile gaming is a pretty large market. China has more than 200 subscribers of mobile gaming. You see all the necessary conditions for that to happen in 5G. For instance you have high speed, low latency, good response time and need some of these specific properties from 5G as well. There are lots of pilot trials going in the space of 5G and XR and we’re working very closely with a partner from that space. It still needs to come out but a good testing of the technology is occurring behind the scenes. So we believe in it.