As soon as Release 15 came out, disaster was waiting to happen

At 6G research and standardisation roadmaps for future, a session organised at 6G India 2023, International Conference & Exhibition was held at New Delhi, May 9 and 10, 2023, (Communications Today was the exclusive media partner) in response to a question, Are new revenue streams being established with 5G, and is it creating the right feelings as far as 6G is concerned Satish Jamadagni, ex TSDSI vice-chair said,

“5G has seen a massive investment across the globe. GSMA numbers state something close to a trillion dollars has been spent across the globe. But not sure, we have seen revenues coming back.

There are certain things one has to understand as far as 5G is concerned, the way it was designed.

First of all, 5G was to a very great extent an extension of LTE, if you look at the airways, which is more or less the same thing as LTE, with 100 megahertz, obviously, it was expected to give much higher throughputs.

But the biggest shift that 5G was supposed to show was enable B2B use cases, not B2C use cases, operators were not supposed to be sellers, but were supposed to be doing enterprise businesses, but to a very large extent, that has not happened so far. It still remains a B2C business, And why has the enterprise segment not necessarily taken off, there are a lot of other things. The nature of the architecture itself is one of them. For B2B business scenarios to be enabled and a lot of other considerations will have to be accounted for.

5G is heavy, bulky. And when you get into enterprise, you’re pitted with Wi-Fi 6, Wi- Fi 7, which is already endorsed by the industry, the critical so called Industry 4.0 also. These are all some of the key challenges that one will have to look into.

We are pitted against a technology where we get USD 100 access points. 5G isn’t necessarily the same thing.

Spectrum is another key issue, there are a ton of issues. The one key issue people don’t understand is also with respect to devices. Wi-Fi devices are phenomenal. It has already penetrated into all kinds of use cases including IoT, including cameras, sensors. It’s everywhere. But if you look at the 5G device ecosystem, for IoT, you needed different kind of devices. We have a different category of devices.

The ironical part about 5G is, there’s no such thing called 5G IoT at all. If you’re a keen observer of the standardization process, much of what is called 5G IoT, is just and extension of the releases of LTE IoT. Whatever you might call it, you still go to LTE, you still talk Cat 1, you still talk narrowband IoT, that is an extension of what was already happening. So it’s more of plus-plus of what was already available in LTE. That’s where we stand.

So seriously, responding to the question, what does 5G bring onto the table? That’s one key question that we ourselves have been asking.

This also implies on the revenues What does it look for the revenues? Fixed wireless is touted as one of the key revenue earners.

There are other issues also, the device ecosystem again. You are pitted against fiber. If you go to fixed wireless, you have to be on par with whatever experience people are seeing with fiber. And then there are still issues with respect to device ecosystem for such use cases. That’s one of the reasons why you’ve not seen fixed wireless going everywhere. There are mmWave issues, massive MIMO issues, throughput issues, SNR issues, all these issues are there.

So, we have a badly designed 5G, I was never happy about it. I’ve been vocal from day one, not today. Immediately, as soon as Release 15 came out, I knew this was disaster, waiting to happen.

So lessons to be learned. And at least with 6G, we don’t want vested interests to, basically dominate standardization, we need ensure that our voices are heard.

That’s where we are.”

CT Bureau