Bharti Airtel, Vi worried about Indian 5Gi standard

Top telecom operators and vendors, including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea, Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Samsung, Qualcomm and more companies, have expressed their fear of India going ahead with the 5Gi standard. For the unaware, India came out with its own 5G standard called 5Gi, which was different from that of the one proposed by the 3GPP. The only thing is, the 5Gi standard isn’t as good as what the Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI) claims it to be.

As per an ET Telecom report, the companies and the vendors’ requests have been continuously rejected to conduct a holistic assessment of the standard within TSDSI. Thus, the companies have submitted a joint statement to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) requesting the Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC) to test the 5Gi standard theoretically and also through field testing. Before the 5Gi standard is made the mandatory norm, it is important that these tests happen.

5Gi not better than 3GPP 5G standard
The companies said that if there’s no significant gain in cost or network efficiency found, the 3GPP standard should not be modified by any nation. The biggest thing to note here is that the standard has not been proven commercially, so it would be very risky to go ahead with fixing the 5Gi standard as the mandatory norm for the operators and the vendors in India.

This would further affect smartphones. The smartphones for India would especially come with technology supporting the 5Gi standard, which might create issues with international roaming. Further, the cost of building the smartphones, especially for India with the 5Gi standard, would increase for the companies, which would then result in a higher price for the end consumer.

The operators have warned that if the 5Gi standard is implemented in India, it might affect the way consumers look at 5G. The 3GPP standard of 5G would be a safer bet to go with at the moment. TelecomTalk