Accelerating India’s future with 5G

Most of us are familiar with the buzz around the upcoming deployment of 5G, expected to roll out in developed nations around 2020, and by 2022, in India.

Since the advent of the internet in India over 25 years ago, the country has seen low penetration of data connectivity, which has often hindered our vision to grow as a digital economy.

But with 5G, we can plot the future — a future where the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are mainstream, and connectivity is seamless, designed to improve the quality of e-governance and education, as well as to enable financial inclusion, smart cities, and an intelligent transportation system.

Above everything else, in a rapidly developing economy such as India, 5G will show impactful results in agriculture and healthcare.

India’s agricultural sector hasn’t kept pace with the rapid technological transformations available in the global market.

An assessment made by the UN shows that 5G and IoT could enable the agriculture industry to deliver a 70 per cent increase in food production worldwide by 2050, catering to the ever-growing global population.

Smart farming is one of the few outstanding examples of how farmers can be empowered to harness new technologies that improve farming.

Late last year, when several villages and cities around Punjab, Haryana and Delhi were engulfed in thick smog resulting from burnt crop residue, Taraori, a small village in Haryana, adopted climate-smart agriculture technology to break away from such archaic and hazardous crop management techniques.

Through the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security project, farmers in the village have access to ‘climate smart’ agro advisories on their mobiles, including weather forecasts and recommended actions, as well as information on pests, seed varieties and techniques for conservation agriculture.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. To help proliferate smart farming in India, it is critical to establish a comprehensive rural broadband network that provides real-time information to farmers and rural institutions.

Another early beneficiary of the 5G roll-out will be the healthcare sector. The Indian medical tourism industry is expected to double in size by 2020, to touch $8 billion, and the advent of 5G will allow for blistering fast broadband, combined with Virtual Reality (VR) and AI, to empower medical practitioners by, on one hand, providing more data on diseases, and on the other, by delivering diagnosis and treatment that is not restricted by physical limitations.

While there is much to hope for, the slow penetration of 4G in the country has created a general sense of scepticism around the arrival of 5G; yet, given the fact that India does not have the burden of 4G infrastructure, we must aspire to leapfrog to 5G.

The Ericsson Mobility report reiterates this point and predicts that India, along with North America, will lead the way in numbers of 5G subscriptions by 2022, and that 5G will speed up the digital transformation in a number of industries, enabling new use cases in areas such as IoT, automation, transport and big data.

The technologies to make this a reality are already here — for example, 5G modems that support LTE and CDMA, and a mobile trial platform, are already available.

The time is ripe for the Indian government to focus on spectrum policies and regulations for 5G deployment, and to study potential coexistence issues before deciding spectrum allocations.

An early policy will help the operators and ecosystem prepare their products and services for 5G roll-out, and enable backhaul and network solutions to reach rural India on time.

So far, 5G has been a largely government-led charter; however, the industry must become a partner to accelerate technology, standards and spectrum. No one company can move this technology forward alone.

The industry must define, prototype and deliver early 5G products and solutions, and use cases that will shape the market.

In all this, it is critical to set standards that support interoperability and guide the development of technologies that work with other products or systems, present or future.

It is equally necessary for industry, academia and research labs to collaborate to build 5G test beds in a build-up to deploy the technology in India.

As an estimated 50 billion devices begin to speak with each other and generate zettabytes of data, industries will be disrupted, new categories will be launched, and unheard-of business models conceived.

In all this, 5G will act as a catalyst. Our vision is to connect everything to everything, and everybody to everything, making ‘Digital India’ a truly connected one.

The writer is the MD of South Asia - Intel Corporation