Mukesh Ambani, MD and Chairman, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), amongst many others, have time and again said that India should lead the fifth revolution that combines both humans and machines in the workplace. To do this, India needs to be ahead of other nations in 5G. Being ahead doesn’t only mean rolling out new technologies faster. Instead, it is all about rolling out technologies that are better, feasible in cost, and are homegrown. This is the only way India can go ahead with being the number one nation when it comes to 5G.
Developing Homegrown Tech Will Change the Game
Developing homegrown 5G tech will ensure that India not only consumes but also sells (in other words - exports). This will help India become an even powerful economy with much less dependability on other nations.
Many experts have said that deployed roll out of 5G in India will help the telecom operators. This is because even if 5G networks had been live right now, it wouldn’t have made a big difference for the telcos because only a minority of the population has 5G smartphones.
Further, the use cases of 5G networks mostly give a message that the next-gen connectivity technology will benefit enterprises more than the consumers. The right way for India to go from here is to focus more on indigenous technology.
This helps the country in becoming self-reliable and also puts it on the map for other nations to purchase equipment/technology from. I am not saying India should go with the 5Gi standard because then that would mean the technology developed here would be rendered useless for the other countries following the 5G standard developed by 3GPP.
5G spectrum auctions are still quite far. Homegrown technology is something that the telcos are focusing on. We might not see a single live 5G network until the first or second quarter of FY23, at least.
