Evolution to 5G: Enabling New Services, Connecting New Industries

In its bid to create awareness on India’s capability to launch 5G services, at the same time as the rest of the world, if not ahead, COAI, the apex industry body representing the major telecom, internet, technology and digital services companies in the country hosted the India Meeting of international experts on ‘Catalysing 5G in India’ on 27th March, 2018 in New Delhi, through its 5G India Forum.

The event was held a week after the plenary meetings in Chennai where the 3GPP executives met and made considerable progress towards finalizing the standards for Non Stand Alone-New Radio (NSA-NR), which allows 5G deployments over existing 4G networks.

The decisions on specifications and standardisations made at the plenary meetings are expected to go a long way in ensuring quick roll-out of 5G technology based services across India and the world. More than 300 delegates from across the globe participated in these meetings with the largest Indian participation, ever. This ascertains that companies working on 5G products are on track for commercialization of 5G services in 2019.

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a mobile communication industry collaboration that organises and manages the standards and development of mobile communications standards. It develops standards for many of the mobile communications standards from GSM through UMTS and LTE to 5G now. It is leading this effort with an active and aggressive participation by more than 550 individual member companies. The Indian friends of 3GPP (IF3) is an initiative by the local Indian offices of Ericsson, Intel, and Qualcomm to fund and support the hosting of 3GPP meetings in India.

The event brought together international experts on 5G face to face with Government, mobile network operators and other industry stakeholders and gave them an informal platform to discuss and deliberate crucial issues regarding the new technology and its uses. The executives included Edward Tiedemann, Senior Vice-President, Qualcomm; Lorenzo Casaccia, Vice-President Qualcomm; Puneet Jain, Intel; Ulrich Dropmann, Chief Technology Officer, Nokia; Asbjörn Grövlen, Researcher, Standardization, Ericsson; Abhay Savargaonkar, CTO, Bharti Airtel; Bhatnagar, President- Technology, RJIO, etc.

“Such an event is fundamental to strengthening the efforts made by 3GPP. Mobile and wireless technology is going to extend massively beyond smartphone applications and is expected to transform societies and industries. The 5G technology evolution is expected to enable new services, connecting new industries, various forms of devices, and empower new user experiences, to support expanded connectivity needs for the next decade and beyond. We will soon see a transformation in the way we live due to 5G and I am glad that India is at the forefront of this change,” said Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary, Department of Telecommunications.

COAI, recently launched the 5G India Forum, consisting of industry stakeholders. This forum will facilitate cooperation between government and industry in shaping the strategic, commercial, and regulatory development of the 5G ecosystem in India.

“We are working to ensure that Indian customers will experience 5G along with rest of the world. The new standards finalised by 3GPP and this meeting of experts will enable Indian telcos to transition to new technologies while ensuring that the demands of various sectors is well met. COAI’s 5G India Forum and IF3 will continue to work together as the efforts to make 5G specifications for delivery of services across sectors including automobiles, agriculture, logistics, medicine and health gain momentum and the Telecom Service Providers come closer to providing services across sectors which is vital to enable them achieve Digital India,” said Rajan S Mathews, Director General, COAI.