Satcom integral to success of 5G in India: BIF

At a Digital Dialogues on the theme of ‘Satcom & 5G – The Final Frontier', BIF released a White Paper on Satellites for 5G & Rural Connectivity.

Satcom Essential for 5G - BIF

BIF said that Nicholas Chuberre, Rapporteur, 3GPP NTN Work Item; Kishore Babu, DDG, SRI, DoT and R. Shakya, DDG (Satellite), DoT, attended the event.

Furthermore, the think tank said that the speakers talked about the role satcom will play in 5G proliferation. They also talked about the critical aspects of the role of satellites in 5G, progress of integration of Satellite into global 5G standards, implications of technology advancements, user requirements, various new use cases and the recommended way forward for India in this vital domain.

Many industry leaders also attended the BIF event. These included, P.J. Nath, Chair of the Satcom Committee, Tata Nelco, K. Krishna, Co-Chair, Hughes India, Rahul Vatts, Co-Chair, OneWeb and Gautam Sharma, Member, Inmarsat.

TV Ramachandran, President, Broadband India Forum, said, “satcom will play a significant role in 5G and beyond, and with future integration into emerging technology standards, it will arise as part of the mainstream, besides continuing to play its role as a complementary solution for ubiquitous coverage, emergency/disaster recovery and remote rural areas connectivity. Conservative estimates show that since we need 2 TB for backhaul capacity alone, based on the present availability, we need almost 20x the capacity to meet the requirement, thus outlining the immense potential opportunities ahead for the satcom sector.”

The BIF Whitepaper on Satcom

The White Paper titled “Satellites for 5G & Rural Connectivity”, is authored by Anil Tandan, Group CTO, Lycamobile UK Limited (Former CTO, Idea Cellular) and Gaurav Kharod, Managing Sales Director, South Asia and India, Intelsat. The Paper highlights the role and importance of Satellite Communications in the 5G Ecosystem, with special emphasis on serving the rural and remote areas.

The whitepaper highlights the following points:

1. Satellite Backhaul of 5G Cell Sites - Cellular backhaul over satellite enables mobile network operators (MNOs) to expand their coverage into geographic areas previously considered economically and feasibly beyond their reach, without much delays.
2. IoT over Satellites – Billions of monitoring systems as part of IoT, will be connected to the 5G ecosystem using sensors and devices (M2M), and in many instances connected via satellites through enhanced bandwidth and power efficient terminals.
3. Universal Coverage - Satellites provide a wide coverage to complement and extend the dense urban terrestrial coverage targeted by 5G.
4. Resilience - Satellites will support a resilient 5G network to mitigate the problems of overload/congestion faced by terrestrial networks.
5. Reliability - Given that satellites also operate in the lower frequency bands, these are ideal for high-reliability applications, including safety services.
6. Latency - It is important that the design of 5G air interface be universal to support varying levels of latencies through seamless management and orchestration of heterogeneous satellites and terrestrial network elements in order to support a variety of unique user experiences.
7. Content Multicast - An efficient satellite multicast delivery will help improve user Quality of Experience (QoE), reduce backhaul traffic load and provide immediate and on-demand content access by shifting the Content Delivery Network (CDN) closer to the user, as part of providing next-gen efficient edge computing solutions.