5G Rollout

5G will connect everything whether it is a machine, object, or consumer. With massive machine type of communications.

At TLF 5G Conference by Voice&Data, held in September 2022, a fireside chat session on 5G Rollout was held between Dinesh Chand Sharma, Director, European Project on Standards and Ashwani Khillan, COO & CTO, APAC, American Tower Corp. Some excerpts.

DS Sharma, who moderated the session said, it is no more the time to talk about technologies. We need to roll out and transform everything. Everything will get connected. Broadband demand has gone up, and the role of latency has really gone up!

We have URLLC and mMMC. We will have a layered architecture. We are having smart cities, mobility, energy, etc. 5G has a lot of potential. 4G will continue to co-exist with 5G for a number of years. The government of India has added a lot of options in place to ensure new technology gets rolled out. It is also focusing on 6G. There is the existing infrastructure that was rolled out. Rural infrastructure has connectivity. Affordability is the most important factor.

Sharma said, 5G will connect everything whether it is a machine, object, or consumer. With massive machine type of communications. There are predictions that today if we have two devices with us, from the perspective of machine to machine or IoT, these devices will become 10 by 2025. And even this new architecture, which is a network layer, layered architecture. There are many use cases, which are non-ICT sectors, but we are putting them a layer of ICT and we call them smart. The moment you use the terminology Smart City, smart citizen, smart mobility, smart energy, what you're doing is actually you're bringing a non-ICT sector into an ICT domain. And that's why  5G Technology has a lot of potential in itself. But of course, any technology when introduced, it brings its own challenges and that's what I think we're going to debate and discuss from one of the major infrastructure providers in the country. There is also a kind of open question people do ask, why all these use cases cannot be fulfilled by 4G? Yes, it does. But look at the potential of explosion in terms of data. Social networking, for example, the kind of data we are generating and accumulating we call it Big Data analytics. While the use cases can be taken care of by the existing 4G technologies with more spectrum has been auctioned in recent times for 4G as well. So 4G will continue to coexist with 5G and any new technology that comes it gets introduced in a phased manner it can not be rolled out just by the flick of time and with technology like 5G, it will take its own time. So,  both technologies will coexist for, maybe five to six years, but yes, the kind of support the Government of India has put in place while introducing or while auctioning the spectrum and on top of it many more initiatives, ease of doing business, amending the IT Act, all these are just to ensure that this new technology is rolled out as quick as possible, and the government can start focusing on the next technology research and innovation, we call it 6G. But of course, before 6G, 5G Beyond will happen.

How has the existing infrastructure supported demand? Ashwani Khillan, COO & CTO, APAC American Tower Corp., said that we need to look at paradigms changing between 4G and 5G. Two clear paradigms are spectrum band, and we need more densification. We have more applications coming in. As we have more apps, we need to touch upon latency. That brings in the third paradigm: the infrastructure needs to be as close to the customer. Form factors are also changing.

Next, we need to keep scale in mind! With the move to 3300MHz, we will probably need to add 75% more PoPs. We need to have 6,000-7,000 towers additionally. 3.3GHz band can provide indoor and outdoor coverage. We need to add nearly half a million more PoPs, especially over the next 4-5 years. It is a big challenge for us.

Sharma said there will be 1 million 5G devices, against 60,000 4G devices in the same area. We will see 5G roll out in 13 cities initially. Khillan said all challenges have been accepted and put in place. New challenges are being put before us. There can be slow proliferation for any service. 4G started getting rolled out in 2014-15. 5G will go through a similar route.

DoT carried out a study regarding the massive rollout of 5G. Now, states have been asked to carry out mapping exercises. Gujarat and UP have almost completed this. How will such steps help? Khillan said the need is to increase the PoPs. They also need to be fiberized as soon as possible. We also used to run de-aggregation over edge data centers. We need to further improve that. We will need PoP every 200m in dense, urban areas. Streetlights may be a good example. They should all get fiberized, and be grid connected. We need to keep them light, with the infrastructure. All the stakeholders now need to get their acts together. Sharma said we are going to have new infrastructure. Government mapping will also be used. Regarding QoS, Khillan said it is a common problem. With a large population, we need to work on QoS. It is difficult to satisfy all consumers. QoS is a continuous improvement in the process.