“5G will be most advanced machine-to-machine communication”, says Anjani Kumar, Raritan

As announced during the Interim Budget for 2019, mobile data consumption has grown by 50 times monthly in the last 5 years. With the low tariffs on voice calls and data plans, the data volumes are going to explode. This all will put a lot of strain on data centers on the telecom side. With the influx of IoT, Cloud and mobile technologies like 4G, the demand for data centers in India is going up as it is responsible for both processing and hosting network and infrastructure-related information.

Going forward, we will also have 5G for which a lot of planning has to put in place. Discussing what 5G has in store for the telecom data centers in India, Anjani Kumar, India Country Manager, Raritan-a brand of Legrand says that 5G will revolutionise the telecom sector especially the data centers. However, he believes that its impact is manifold. 5G will usher in Internet of things (IoT), which will enable much more intelligence in the system along with higher data speeds. 5G will connect people to everything. It will be the most advanced machine-to-machine communication that will enable secure connectivity between devices other than smartphones, such as sensors, vehicles, robots, and drones. 5G will be helpful across sectors ranging from agriculture and healthcare to manufacturing and warehousing.

The biggest advantage of 5G is ultra-low latency of 1 millisecond and 10-plus Gbps speeds will allow access to high-bandwidth multimedia and data services for various industrial applications. By the time of its global launch in 2020, 5G will practically converge our physical, virtual and social worlds through the Internet of Things and Big Data Analytics. This decrease in latency will make possible use-cases such as autonomous cars and remote surgeries. High throughput would enable infinitely large amounts of data flowing on the network. It’s imperative that the country’s entire networking infrastructure is capable of supporting 10-gigabit speeds and sub-millisecond latency.

Thus, the main impact of 5G will be speed and the volume of data it will generate through connected devices that need to be stored and be made available for real-time insights across sectors.

In order to fulfill demands, data centers in the telecom sector need to go for data center diversification. This would include coming up with microdata centers, increased investment in proprietary data centers, CoLos, or, most likely, a combination of the three.