INDIAN TELCOS READY FOR 5G
TALKING ABOUT HOW India is not late in rolling out 5G capabilities, Sunil Bharti Mittal, Founder and Chairman of Bharti Enterprises, in a chat with Rahul Kanwal, News Director, India Today and Aaj Tak, and Executive Director, BT, said that 5G has started to take root across many countries around the world, and the Indian telecom industry, too, is absolutely ready to roll it out. He added that some use cases of the technology have already been developed and the prices of devices have also started to come down.
Further elaborating on how Airtel and the other telecom players in the country have been building towards this moment, he sounded a word of caution for the customers. He said that while in the beginning, the average customer might not be impacted a lot with the roll-out of 5G, the use cases that have been developed around the world could be a game changer for India. He cited robotic surgeries, healthcare management in rural areas, and distribution of centres of excellence around the country as prime examples of how 5G could prove to be transformative for the country.
“Don’t build a mega facility in Mysore because scale is not important anymore. You can have 100 centres distributed in the country so that employees can be working from very close to where they are and they can get the same experience that they would have got when they were in Mysore. Holograms, virtual rooms, virtual teaching, participative experiments; everything can be done in a distributed way because of 5G,” he said, while describing how it will enable ‘data on steroids’. Which means that internet speeds for individual customers could be modulated based on their usage and need. For instance, he described how 5G would allow operators to deliver a higher speed of connectivity to an autonomous bus during an emergency, versus an individual listening to music on her phone.
Further, he added that if India is to become a digital economy, it needs healthy telecom companies, as they are the backbone of the connectivity that is required to power growth in a growing economy in the modern world.