Will the Gifts of 5G Come?

— Ashok Jhunjhunwala

Wireless has given telecom and internet to the whole of India. It is no longer voice and messages alone. The 4G wireless has given video that has caught the imagination of the mass in India. There is wide speculation about 5G. What is this 5G technology? How will it help India?

What the government needs to do is to find about 400 MHz required in 3.5 GHz band, so that multiple operators can provide this service. In addition, the higher band would imply requirement of smaller cells, which would be an advantage in terms of multiplication of spectrum through more reuse.

home. In absence of quality wired network, this can be a huge bonanza.

The third major gift of 5G will be low-latency end-toend links. With a heavy network layer, the 4G network can take up to 30 milliseconds to deliver data; the protocols in 5G are reworked to cut it down to a few milliseconds at most. It will open up the possibilities for a whole lot of new delay-critical applications and the ability to leverage technologies such as AR/VR. While the West will use the low-delay data links for driverless cars, India may find applications in a variety of sectors such as driverless tractors for agriculture or remote emergency health interventions. Many believe that narrow-band IoT will be another major gift of 5G. It will be so, though IoT is today ready to be implemented in 4G itself.

The Indian operators have innovated a lot on the servicedelivery side over the last twenty years, in order to provide telecom service at the lowest tariffs in the world. Today, one can get unlimited high-speed Internet, messages and voice calls (in India) at under Rs 500 per month. In West, one may not be able to get this at costs less than Rs 3,000 per month. This is so, even though license fees, spectrum charges, taxes and duties on telecom in India are quite significant. But India has largely lost out in developing and manufacturing equipment needed to provide this service. Almost everything from infrastructure to handsets is imported. The Indian operators as a rule do not believe that Indian engineering teams can innovate and make such equipment in India.

This is so even though wireless telephony started in India in ‘90s with the indigenous development and manufacturing of corDECT Wireless in Local Loop; later-on Bangalore-based Tejas Networks started making fibre-optic transmission systems used by most operators in India, and a few other companies also supplied similar equipment. Also, in many cases, it is the Indian engineers employed by multinationals in India that develop most of the hardware and software for these telecom systems. Today telecom imports are a primary foreign exchange drain for the country. Will it continue with 5G?

There are reasons to believe that this will start reversing and the operators who help drive this process would win, as they would be able to far-batter manage their costs. Over the last few years companies like Foxconn, Flextronics, Wistron and Samsung are not only assembling phones in India for the Indian market, but also exporting them at scale, employing about 0.7 million people as on date. It is this context that the recent reduction of handset export incentives from 4% to 2% under WTO pressure is ill-timed

The change which has already started to happen in this direction is in terms of manufacturing of smartphones and feature phones in India. Over the last few years companies like Foxconn, Flextronics, Wistron and Samsung are not only assembling phones in India for the Indian market, but also exporting them at scale, employing about 0.7 million people as on date. It is in this context that the recent reduction of handset export incentives from 4% to 2% under WTO pressure is illtimed; and we hope the Government of India will find ways to reverse the decision. The value-add is still small, but the manufacturers and MEITY are working on making as many components as possible in India and increase the value add to 15-20% or more.

Fortunately, 5G radio and chipsets will not add significantly to the complexities in assembling. With concerted effort and a bit of R&D, India could aim to increase this number towards 40-50% and with

enhancement of smartphone export the country could then significantly offset its imports.

Over the last decade, Indian researchers, especially at IITs have been working on generating innovations which could become part of the international wireless standards and address specific Indian requirements such as better rural coverage and indoor penetration in the concrete urban sprawls. However, it has not been easy to get international standard bodies to accept these innovations, as existing lobbies are strong. Recognising this, the Indian researchers joined hand with department of telecommunications (DOT), Indian operators and manufacturers to setup Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI).

At the same time, researchers enhanced their R&D effort and participated actively in international standardmaking bodies for 5G through TSDSI and started presenting their innovations for inclusion in the standard. A major contribution of theirs enabling large cells (6 km radius) in rural areas has been incorporated as a part of the 5G standard proposed by TSDSI.

So far the wireless infrastructure—base stations, base station controllers and switching equipment—has been supplied to Indian operators only by international players. 5G provides an opening to the Indian companies. First, part of the network-side equipment known as the 5G wireless core would run on standard servers instead of proprietary hardware available only from select companies. Much of the software is available in India and, over time, one expects Indian operators to use them.

The other significant developments in 5G are the introduction of standardised interfaces between various sub-systems, for e.g., the interface between the radio head-end and the Radio Baseband Processing unit. The two could be now independently purchased. Indian start-ups are quite capable of making an entry into this disaggregated space.

However, larger companies may continue to play a dominant role here due to the cutting-edge real-time computing and radio signal processing that is required. Still Indian companies will get their nose-in. With enough talent available in India, it is possible that some Indian operators will use them to theirs and India’s benefit.

The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is not called IT-enabled Services (ITES) without accident. Without IT and telecom this industry would not have happened. If you go back 30 years when we came up with the concept, the big play was labour arbitrage because the cost of an Indian employee in India was (and even still is) at a fraction of the cost of the US employee. IT and telecom could make it possible for the Indian employee can do the same workfrom India and still be 50-60% lower cost than if done in the US despite the cost of IT and telecom. That is how we started leveraging technology.

What started as a cost saving and resource availability option spawned into an industry. I conducted some inhouse experiments for American Express to show that the Indian workforce was competent, capable and trainable to handle the launch of American Express card in India. It showed the potential and started the BPO revolution 35 plus years ago.

American Express was the first to see the potential based on what we demonstrated and presented. It certainly was not an easy task as we had no fiber optic cables or mobile. There were landlines and copper was the last mile, which used to have breakages and downtime; 50% uptime was very acceptable! It was the era when one had to place “lightning calls” (at 8 or 16 times the already high cost of international call) to speak to somebody abroad, which was an experience in itself because typically you could not even speak for the three minutes which was the minimum time you paid for.

So, when I came up with the idea of doing back office in India one of my bosses said: “Raman I can’t talk to you for three minutes without the call dropping and you’re telling me that you will do all my vendor payables. Are you mad? There is no way you can do it because you have to speak to the vendor, and you can’t speak to them for more than three minutes.”

The cost saving was mouthwatering (we had done the numbers) as was the capability of the Indian workforce. Amex took a chance and I got the opportunity to take a lead as Business Leader Accounting operations. The extremely capable work force, leveraging technology with newly learnt terms of redundancy and back up showed the potential of what could be. We rapidly grew the possibilities. We not only met, but far exceeded the targets.

Soon other international companies saw what we were doing and wanted to leverage the Indian workforce and make significant cost savings. The most visible was the effort of GE Capital. They asked me to lead “duplicating the success of American Express”. While in American Express we proved what was possible it was in GE (now Genpact) that we were able to demonstrate that this was replicable and scalable.

The fact that technology improved by leaps and bounds while becoming more cost effective played a significant role. The telecom costs and technology costs going down was linked to the “liberalization” of the Indian economy and was the biggest catalyst. Coupled with what was a now demonstrated capability and trainability of the Indian workforce. It was a revolution waiting to happen… And happen it did.

The early days

Our ability to rely on the domestic telco infrastructure was near zero. We experimented with dedicated lines

from India with multiple last mile “backups”, dropped multiple lines into the US, thereby overcoming the infrastructure challenge. We created those dedicated data speed lines at a time when getting a one Mbps line was a big deal. When I went to VSNL (that time the monopoly provider of international lines) and requested for three Mbps connectivity, one of the guys actually asked me whether I was planning espionage, and that was because nobody used that kind of a bandwidth from one facility in those days. convinced VSNL to take a small room in our facility to meet their rules, making it a VSNL landing hub.

Technology improved and costs started dropping thereby increasing the possibilities. Just to put it in perspective, companies like Avaya, and even their predecessor Lucent did not even have a presence then in India and there was no one to offer intelligent switching of calls or data. So we had to get the switching equipment, learn how to utilize it, and what has to be done. It was a whole new learning experience.

and said what I was saying made sense, but I will never be able to get an approval. He advised me to meet a particular senior bureaucrat, who he said “is only one person who can think out of the box” and may agree with me and approve.

The next generation came when we started giving inputs, and were able to come up with modifications and changes. The phase three came when they said we can build our technology and get the work done, while phase four is when India started to productize these services. The next generation will be the India-centric SAS model, and that is what companies such as mine are working on today.