India – Don’t forget 5G!

I recently conducted a poll on the prospects of 5G roll-out in India. I basically tried to gauge the perception about the availability of 5G in India - on or before 2021; or after that. Expectedly, the overwhelming response was the latter. India has too many challenges to surmount before 5G can make an appearance - the auction process, the operator finances and the choice of vendors. Each of these challenges is a topic for separate discussion.

The uncertainty surrounding 5G in India is unfortunate. 5G does promise higher data rates than its predecessor, but that is not its only advantage.

5G institutionalizes network segmentation or 'slicing' according to the traffic profile.

It is thus possible for low throughput IoT sensor traffic to co-exist with data-intensive video without the network designer breaking into a sweat. For India, which has ambitions of developing world-class manufacturing, logistics, transportation, healthcare, finance and governance frameworks; it is important to have a technology that facilitates the achievement of these objectives.

5G is that technology.

It is thus not entirely accurate to view 5G from the prism of high throughput alone.

From an architectural point of view, 5G rides on a cloud-native framework - a radically different approach from conventional telecommunication network function engineering. Cloud-native functions (CNF) bring together constructs of open source, containers, microservices, RAN and packet switching like none other. We, at Insight Research, recently projected that CNFs will come to occupying close to a fifth of the overall Packet Core and RAN market (virtualized and containerized) by 2025. This transformation was unthinkable a few years ago. This trend also underlines that CNFs are very much a work in progress. Given the sheer scale of India's network deployments, India can influence the way in which network functions are engineered. India can also leverage its enormous developer and designer base in cloud-native technologies. 5G thus presents an unprecedented opportunity for the country.

The timing however is of essence, otherwise the opportunity will be diminished.

One hopes that in the surfeit of challenges that India faces at the moment, the country does not lose track of the promise that 5G holds.

Kaustubha Parkhi Principal Analyst, Insight Research

RELATED BLOGS

Are CNFs, VNFs?

Posted: January 11, 2023

      The answer is yes. Our recent report “The VNFO – Ripe for Change” says this loudly and clearly. Pardon the atrocious image. But I hope it encapsulates the dilemma appropriately. It is important to reiterate the reasons for including containers under VNF and in essence, Kubernetes under VNFO. Both VMs and containers … Continue reading Are CNFs, VNFs?

Awakening the Beast in the RAN Equipment Market – An Nvidia Imperative!

Posted: September 24, 2024

      Nvidia has been showing some serious urgency into the RAN. Sample its vision for the AI-RAN Alliance, which it helped birth earlier this year, “Unlike standards-setting organizations, where all the efforts are focused on developing specification documents for interoperability, AI-RAN Alliance’s focus is to create implementation blueprints and benchmark the efficacies of … Continue reading Awakening the Beast in the RAN Equipment Market – An Nvidia Imperative!

The AI-RAN Alliance: The idea whose time has come

Posted: March 18, 2024

      Of all the announcements at MWC24, the one that validates our focus on AI in RAN is the formation of the AI-RAN Alliance. Coinciding with the release of our report “AI and RAN – How fast can they run?”, the Alliance checks all the boxes to furthering AI from the periphery of the … Continue reading The AI-RAN Alliance: The idea whose time has come