India is on the verge of a digital revolution powered by increasing broadband and internet penetration, exponential data uptake, digitization, and increasing adoption of technology, across various industries. This revolution will generate new growth avenues, boost industrial productivity and enhance the potential to transform the socio-economic condition of the country.

Industry experts believe that technological innovation with 5-G will redefine the future of telecom in India and throw open a slew of opportunities across industries like healthcare, education, fintech, eCommerce, and entertainment.

In a special episode, CNBC TV18 together with Qualcomm deep-dive into the potential and implications of 5-G, with Cristiano Amon, President & CEO, Qualcomm, who offered insights into this game-changing technology, along with the challenges and opportunities that it presents.

“The last 18 months have been very busy,” he began. “Our company has seen demand for mobile technologies across virtually every industry. We have been expanding into automotive and Internet of Things and at the same time, we are at the beginning of this incredible transition to 5-G.”

He recounted that as companies across the globe have been going through a process of digital transformation, the demand for semi-conductors has been expanding rapidly. “We have more demand than supply across all our businesses but we are optimistic that all the actions we have put in place to increase supply are going to come to fruition as we enter 2022. We can see supply meeting demand in the near future for some industries and in the medium term for others. Overall, we see a strong sentiment towards the role of technology and the role of semi-conductors when we think about our connected future.”

While at a global level, the transition to 5-G has been faster than expected, Cristiano Amon is excited about 5-G usage in India too. “The rationalization of spectrum usage charges and spectrum deployment is very encouraging and we think India is going to have an incredible opportunity to deploy 5-G,” he shared.

Once the ecosystem is in place, 5-G will connect everything to the cloud 100% of the time. Offering a peek into what can be expected, he said, “5-G will go beyond just connecting users; it will also connect everything around us. With that capability, we are going to see a lot of transformation including the democratization of high-performance ultra-HD 4K videos and streaming, the evolution of gaming to a point wherein mainstream gaming becomes possible through every device, AR and VR devices becoming more popular and being built at greater scale as the next computing platform, etc. 5-G will play a role in smart manufacturing, connected healthcare, education, many other industries.”

As India continues on its path of economic growth and development, 5-G will be a critical ingredient. Qualcomm envisages collaborating with customers from different sectors in India towards providing device technology for all kinds of equipment from industrial and healthcare to connected computers and PCs for education and more.

Echoing the same sentiment, Telecom Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, spoke about where India’s 5-G rollout currently stands at Network18’s Chaupal event, saying, “5-G is a pathbreaking technology; it’s a technological jump. With the advent of 5-G, network speeds, quality of data, upload and download speeds, will all witness great enhancement.” He suggested that 5-G auction and simultaneous roll-out is expected to start by the second quarter of FY2022.

Effectively, we are on the cusp of a great 5-G revolution, which is no longer exclusive to the mobile sector. It will transform virtually every industry and even life as we know it.

This is a partnered post.

First Published:Mar 21, 2022 8:07 PM IST