Title: India’s 5Gi standard, Manufacturing Ecosystem, and Impact
India will see much quicker introduction of 5G technology compared to 4G or 3G. There will
be a number of firsts when this happens. For the first time, India will have the option of
deploying the Indian TSDSI-developed 5Gi standard seamlessly along with the 3GPP-
developed 5G standard, both being part of the ITU-approved IMT-2020 family. 5Gi will give
rural India better coverage ensuring all villages are within the coverage area of the towers at
panchayat villages. In addition to the MNC vendors manufacturing equipment in India, it is
most likely that for the first time, there will be significant Indian players competing with
them. As a result of the PLI policy, most 5G phones sold in India will be assembled in India,
and exported too. Increasing the value added in these phones is the next challenge before
us.
The 5Gi/5G standard will, as expected, make available more bandwidth to Indian broadband
users, but for the first time, we may see remotely-assisted surgery with sub-millisecond
latency, vehicle-to-vehicle low-latency communication that may enable collision avoidance,
network slices that can provide critical infrastructure, industry 4.0, and law enforcement
guaranteed service quality, and "edge computing services" that reduce latency for local
services such as say, intra-city video-conferencing. The Centre of Excellence in Wireless
Technology at the IITM Research Park and IIT Madras are playing a major role in 5Gi
standardisation and technology development.
Coming Soon!