Growth of broadband infrastructure in 5G era

During a panel discussion around growth of mobile infrastructure in the 5G era, the participants were Anil Jain, CEO, NIXI, Rashim Kapoor, Executive VP & Hub CTO, Airtel, Pankaj Kitchlu, Systems Engineering Director, Juniper Networks, Dr. SN Gupta, Chairman of the Board, Bluetown India & BIMSTEC, South Asia, and Umang Das, Umang Das, Chairman, FIIF and Advisor, RANext. Rajat Mukarji, DG, BIF, was the moderator.

Anil Jain, NIXI, said that the Internet Exchange may be a new concept. ISPs will get connected. We can get information from Google. They come and use the NIXI platform. We have been reducing latency, and cost is delivered back to the customer. 

NIXI has 74 Internet Exchanges in rural and semi-urban centres. Digital education should be available in rural India also. We plan to have a data superhighway, and to have advantage of digital growth in the country, with free of cost provision to rural areas. We are a work economy. Data superhighway needs a super infrastructure. People who cannot afford that, should not be kept away. IP addresses are key. We provide IPv4 and IPv6. India is leading in the IPv6 adoption with over 79% of devices already enabled. NIXI is offering IPv6 free, with IPv4. 

Rashim Kapoor, Airtel, said that we need to reduce cost of deployment of infrastructure. It starts from basic things, such as space. We try to use more green energy. We are also ensuring that the electronics purchased have lower footprint. We are also using lot of upcoming technologies. Virtualization helps us to make more agile networks. We also have self-assurance, self-optimizing networks, etc.

Pankaj Kitchlu, Juniper Networks, said broadband used to be another tenant in the overall scheme of things. We need to make the network of future today. We need to keep it in the centre. Customer experience can be on the left side. There can be an SDN-driven experience. Broadband has silently kept up all this while. It can take care of all your utilities. 

Dr. SN Gupta, BIMSTEC, said that each player has some priorities. Projects are all about execution. Broadband is today a critical infrastructure. The total infrastructure is the digital public infrastructure. They need to become public digital goods. Every stakeholder now has a responsibility. Everyone can control this! We should make broadband as public digital good. You can pool everything together. 

Umang Das, RANext, added that implementation can be with cooperation. National Broadband Mission has said fibre should cover 25-50km. There is a massive task ahead of us. It can be of the order of Rs. 2.5 lac crores. Government's infrastructure budget is about Rs. 10 lac crores. Telecom has largely been private sector investment. Government has been stepping in, since the USO funding.

Digital infrastructure is also the bedrock of the Digital India mission. We now need to differentiate between the infrastructure and the services. The infrastructure layer needs to be rolled out in the time frame of 2-3 years. We need an authority that can take decisions faster. We do need to set up a National Digital Infrastructure Finance Corporation. 

We also need to have clear strategy how can we attract foreign infrastructure. Digitalization will play a role across every sector. We need to be able to implement recommendations. That's where the public good also comes in!