5G is Going to be a Platform – Jagbir Singh, CTO, Vodafone Idea

Speaking at the 3^rd edition of Voice&Data TLF 5G Conference “5G for Delivering Transformation”, Jagbir Singh, CTO, Vodafone Idea talked about how 5G held the power to transform a variety of industries, and allow for many use cases which were deemed impossible to achieve with previous generations.

5G – A Platform for Innovation

Talking about Vodafone Idea’s own experience as a telecom operator, he said that till now, operators have deployed networks as a connectivity layer. However, 5G, he said, will allow the operators to build the new networks as the “platform for the digital society”. Singh added that it will transform everyone’s day-to-day life.

Singh said that there were around 180-200 5G network operators across the world, covering around 500 million users. However, he said that by the end of 2026, this number will go up to 3.5 billion people. He said that this means that over the next 5 years, a large chunk of the population will still be on 4G. Hence, the target of the telcos now has to be to build 5G networks as a platform.

Further, Singh added that most of the data consumption comes from video consumption. In India, he shared, video content comprises of around 70% of overall data traffic. He said that 5G will take the per person per month usage from 14 GB to 40 GB.

He added that going forwards, this will be the key focus of 5G networks in the country. Since India’s smartphone penetration is on the low side right now, 5G use cases will only be effective in high smartphone density regions. Therefore, rural smartphone penetration is one of the most important aspects to make 5G a success.

High Speed is not Enough

The Vodafone Idea CTO said that just high speed is not enough justification of the amount of investment that is going in 5G. As such, telcos need other applications for it to make it a worthwhile investment.

Fixed wireless access remains one of the key factors to boost connectivity. Singh mentioned that many of the aforementioned operators across markets have tried deploying FWA successfully. Speaking on the reason of the popularity of the FWA, he said “barring China, Japan and Korea, most of the countries do not have fiber penetration”. He said FWA can provide FTTH-like performance in countries such as India, where fiber penetration remains at 3-4%.

Some of the key use cases that Jagbir mentioned were telemedicine and massive IoT. Talking of first, he said that rural areas will have access to better healthcare with proper FWA penetration in these areas. Secondly, he said that massive IoT will become one of the most important use case; he said that there will be at least 10 times the use by massive IoT as compared to consumers.

Jagbir also mentioned that AR and VR also becomes an important use case; delivering expertise on the edge with the help of 5G can allow much faster solutions. Like network slicing, AR and VR will become a native application on the network.

Finally, he added that developing 5G as a platform will be a cooperative exercise – government, telecom operators, gear makers and others have to work in tandem to successfully deploy it in the country.