5G will Play a Big Role in Shaping our Future – Gautam Billa, Sr. Director: Pre-sales & System Engineering, Ciena International

Speaking at the 3^rd edition of Voice&Data TLF 5G Conference “5G for Delivering Transformation”, Gautam Billa, Sr. Director: Pre-sales & System Engineering, Ciena International, said that 5G will touch each and every aspect of our lives.

5G will Lead the Way for Innovation

Gautam, talking from his own experience, gave the example of how the TV has progressed from black and white to color, from CRT to OLED. He said that the content revolution started from the 2010s. He also cited the same report as one of the other spokespeople at the event; a whitepaper by IDC from 2018. It stated that the global datasphere will rise to 175 ZB by 2025.

To put that in context, he said, “if someone were to download the same amount of data over a standard 25 Mbps connection, it would take them 1.8 billion years to download it all”. Notwithstanding the internet bill, that is an unimaginable duration of time.

He also said that the mobile networks have gone through multiple phases. “First phase was all about coverage and connectivity”, he said. Next phase, he said, was about data driven use cases. Citing the example of Jio’s launch in 2016, he said that the data consumption shot up. Billa added that this was the reason for the growth of data centers and cloud business in India.

He further drew parallels between the retail and ecommerce markets and the cloud and IT markets. He said as the ecommerce market carved out a share from the retail market, so did the cloud to IT. He said that the pandemic has only hastened the process.

“5G is expected to drive transformation in every industry that we know of”, he said.

The Systems Engineering head at Ciena said that consumer and enterprise use cases are wide-reaching both in variety and scope. Right now, with 4G, consumer use cases, apart from mobility, include home connectivity, OTT content consumption, and so on. He said that with the introduction of 5G, companies will have to employ network slicing.

Billa mentioned the applications of network slicing in enhanced mobile backhaul and urLLC, on the consumer side. On the enterprise side, companies can use 5G for process automation or simply as a private network.

He concluded by expressing the hope that more collaboration will happen within the industry in the run up to 5G.