5G is a force-multiplier for India’s trillion-dollar digital economy

As someone who has been an entrepreneur and participant in, and spectator to, almost three decades of the creation, growth, and expansion of the Indian mobile telecom sector, the imminent coming of 5G fills me with a sense of tremendous anticipation.

5G is the 5th generation of wireless technology for people but it is the first generation for machines. 5G will deeply alter and redesign the current digital and mobile internet landscape by embedding ever more intelligent, autonomous sensors and devices into our internet. For India, 5G represents significant new opportunities for our trillion-dollar digital economy goals.

From importer to innovator
It was a proud milestone to recently witness the Director of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras Professor V Kamakoti—followed thereafter by Union Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw—making video calls on a completely indigenously designed and built 5G core and stack, a fully AtmaNirbhar solution.

This 5G testbed which operates at both non-mmWave 5G and mmWave 5G frequencies, was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May 2022 for startups and industries, to develop and validate 5G applications and systems and ‘Make for India’ and ‘Make in India for the World’.

This development of India’s 5G capabilities and the recent inclusion of India’s 5Gi standards by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project as part of global 5G standards are big milestones for the Indian wireless sector. For the last three decades, through 2G, 3G, and 4G, India has largely been a consumer of technology with almost every piece of the network, software stack, applications, and devices imported. Bloomberg