IMC 2022: Nunzio Mirtillo, Ericsson

Highlights of his presentation
Nunzio Mirtillo, senior vice-president and head of market area Southeast Asia, Oceania & India, Ericsson, said, “5G adoption in India will be faster than anywhere else in the world. The willingness of Indians to adopt new technology is second to none. It happened with 4G too.

We, at Ericsson have prepared ourselves to manage the volumes that are required for India. In India, through our contract manufacturing partner Jabil, we have manufacturing capability, which we will scale up in order to cope with the demand.

Volumes from the Indian market are much higher than other countries in the region. Currently, you have an average consumption of 20 GB per month and a bit more than that. It is expected that on an average consumption will go up to 50 GB per month by 2027.

With this kind of traffic demand, the subscribers of broadband will also increase from 800 million to 1.2 billion and out of which 500 million will be of 5G. The demand will increase because of subscribers and because of usage. Without 5G you can’t cope with that big increase.

O-RAN is part of our R&D roadmap. As far as India is concerned, there is no space for O-RAN in the short term. India is the most challenging for the 5G roll-out because of its scale. Operators need the best state-of-the-art technology in the world, so that they do not risk their business.

5G will give a final push to lndia and will help in bridging the digital divide. You will remove financial and social divide. It will give a push to start-ups to build use case and export them all over the world and will Make-in-India better and advance.

India in a way for us is a very strategic market. India is very big country because of huge volumes and because India is at the forefront of innovation. It’s a place where you need latest cutting-edge technology. And it is fantastic place for Ericsson as it will allow Ericsson to stay on the edge of Innovation.

To be competitive in India means to be competitive in rest of the world. We are investing in India because of competence and because of the demographic dividend. We have 22,000 employees in India.

We have our factory in India. And basically, we produce 90-100 per cent of our technology in India so we are real actor of Make-in-India in India. All the products we need for the roll-out are produced in India. We have modularity; we can scale up and scale down based on our needs.”

CT Bureau