Will the gifts of 5G come?

While the West will use the low-delay data links for driverless cars, India may find applications for 5G in a variety of sectors such as driverless tractors for agriculture or remote emergency health interventions.

By Ashok Jhunjhunwala

Wireless has given telecom and internet to the whole of India. It is no longer the voice and messages alone. The 4G wireless has given video that has caught the imagination of the mass in India. There is wide speculation about 5G. What is this 5G technology? How will it help India?

While 3G operates in separate chunks of 5 MHz spectrum, 4G started using the 20 MHz spectrum. What 5G will do is an aggregation of multiple chunks (not necessarily contiguous) of the spectrum into as much as 100 MHz bands. This entire bandwidth can even be used by a single user at times. Even while being shared, such a huge bandwidth gives a huge advantage.

What the government needs to do is to find about 400 MHz required in 3.5 GHz band, so that multiple operators can provide this service. In addition, the higher band would imply the requirement of smaller cells, which would be an advantage in terms of multiplication of the spectrum through more reuse.

The more dramatic change that 5G will bring is communications in 24GHz to 28 GHz band. In this band, the chunks of the spectrum on which a user can transmit or receive are as large as 400 MHz! An 8X8 element phase-array antenna will be as small as 3X3 inch in this band and can be used to beam-steer the whole data stream to a home when needed, providing a virtual fibre-to-home. In the absence of a quality wired network, this can be a huge bonanza.

The third major gift of 5G will be low-latency end-to-end links. With a heavy network layer, the 4G network can take up to 30 milliseconds to deliver data; the protocols in 5G are reworked to cut it down to a few milliseconds at most. It will open up the possibilities for a whole lot of new delay-critical applications and the ability to leverage technologies such as AR/VR.  While the West will use the low-delay data links for driverless cars, India may find applications in a variety of sectors such as driverless tractors for agriculture or remote emergency health interventions. Many believe that narrow-band IoT will be another major gift of 5G. It will be so, though IoT is today ready to be implemented in 4G itself.

What does it mean to ‘Make in India’

The Indian operators have innovated a lot on the service-delivery side over the last twenty years, in order to provide telecom service at the lowest tariffs in the world. Today, one can get unlimited high-speed Internet, messages, and voice calls (in India) at under Rs 500 per month. In the West, one may not be able to get this at costs less than Rs 3,000 per month. This is so, even though license fees, spectrum charges, taxes, and duties on telecom in India are quite significant. But India has largely lost out in developing and manufacturing equipment needed to provide this service. Almost everything from infrastructure to handsets is imported. The Indian operators as a rule do not believe that Indian engineering teams can innovate and make such equipment in India.

This is so even though wireless telephony started in India in the ‘90s with the indigenous development and manufacturing of corDECT Wireless in Local Loop; later-on Bangalore-based Tejas Networks started making fibre-optic transmission systems used by most operators in India, and a few other companies also supplied similar equipment. Also, in many cases, it is the Indian engineers employed by multinationals in India that develop most of the hardware and software for these telecom systems. Today telecom imports are a primary foreign exchange drain for the country. Will it continue with 5G?

There are reasons to believe that this will start reversing and the operators who help drive this process would win, as they would be able to far-batter manage their costs. Over the last few years, companies like Foxconn, Flextronics, Wistron, and Samsung are not only assembling phones in India for the Indian market but also exporting them at scale, employing about 0.7 million people as on date. It is this context that the recent reduction of handset export incentives from 4% to 2% under WTO pressure is ill-timed

The change which has already started to happen in this direction is in terms of the manufacturing of smartphones and feature phones in India. Over the last few years, companies like Foxconn, Flextronics, Wistron, and Samsung are not only assembling phones in India for the Indian market but also exporting them at scale, employing about 0.7 million people as on date. It is in this context that the recent reduction of handset export incentives from 4% to 2% under WTO pressure is ill-timed; and we hope the Government of India will find ways to reverse the decision. The value-add is still small, but the manufacturers and MEITY are working on making as many components as possible in India and increase the value add to 15-20% or more.

Fortunately, 5G radio and chipsets will not add significantly to the complexities in assembling. With concerted effort and a bit of R&D, India could aim to increase this number towards 40-50%, and with the enhancement of smartphone export, the country could then significantly offset its imports.

TSDSI and Indian IPR

Over the last decade, Indian researchers, especially at IITs have been working on generating innovations that could become part of the international wireless standards and address specific Indian requirements such as better rural coverage and indoor penetration in the concrete urban sprawls. However, it has not been easy to get international standard bodies to accept these innovations, as existing lobbies are strong. Recognizing this, the Indian researchers joined hands with the Department of Telecommunications (DOT), Indian operators, and manufacturers to set up the Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI).

At the same time, researchers enhanced their R&D effort and participated actively in international standard-making bodies for 5G through TSDSI and started presenting their innovations for inclusion in the standard. A major contribution of theirs enabling large cells (6 km radius) in rural areas has been incorporated as a part of the 5G standard proposed by TSDSI.

This has been made possible by an innovation involving a new transmit waveform that can be incorporated in the 5G handsets with no increase in cost. With this, India has started to address long-pending needs such as providing coverage to all her villages from the panchayat villages where optical fibre reaches through Bharatnet. Such innovative contributions will get further strengthened in the years to come with hundreds of researchers vigorously working on every aspect of wireless technology and standards. The operators, who need to take more interest in understanding and leveraging India’s R&D, will be able to reduce costs and get ahead.

5G infrastructure

So far the wireless infrastructure—base stations, base station controllers, and switching equipment—has been supplied to Indian operators only by international players. 5G provides an opening to the Indian companies. First, part of the network-side equipment known as the 5G wireless core would run on standard servers instead of proprietary hardware available only from select companies. Much of the software is available in India and, over time, one expects Indian operators to use them.

The other significant developments in 5G are the introduction of standardized interfaces between various sub-systems, for e.g., the interface between the radio head-end and the Radio Baseband Processing unit. The two could be now independently purchased. Indian start-ups are quite capable of making an entry into this disaggregated space.

However, larger companies may continue to play a dominant role here due to the cutting-edge real-time computing and radio signal processing that is required. Still, Indian companies will get their nose-in. With enough talent available in India, it is possible that some Indian operators will use them to theirs and India’s benefit.

Finally, wireless telecom has given a lot to the country’s 1.3 billion people over the last twenty years. It is this which has driven “Digital” in India. 5G can do even more for India. It will however require more strenuous efforts from Indian Government, operators, R&D personnel, start-ups, and manufacturers. Hopefully, they will gear up for this.

The author Ashok Jhunjhunwala is Professor at Department of Electrical Engineering in IIT Madras

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