5G rollout will prove to be a watershed moment in India's digital transformation

5G is the next generation of wireless cellular technology that will provide speeds faster than any previous generation up to 3000 Mbps (3 Gbps) in the real world. It will transform the way we live, work and play and will power a world of connectivity, enabling mixed reality experiences where the physical and digital worlds converge. 

A wireless 5G connection could one day replace your current home or business Internet service. Going forward, enterprises will deploy private 5G networks in combination with a new generation of Wi-Fi to connect people and machines in new ways. Countless devices on the Internet of Things will connect over 5G. And the open architecture of 5G will let companies build new, yet-to-be-imagined services on top of the network. 5G technology is essential, not only for its potential to support a million devices at ultrafast speeds but its capability to transform people's lives around the world. It will deliver higher multi-Gbps peak data speeds, ultra-low latency, more reliability, massive network capacity, and so forth.

It is noteworthy that India took six years to adopt 3G and four years for 4G but it is being said that 5G will be adopted pretty quickly.

“Required spectrum auctions will be conducted in 2022 to facilitate roll-out of 5G mobile services within 2022-23,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in her 2022 budget speech.

With India ready to roll out 5G services in the country, DoT recently confirmed that 13 cities in India would get 5G services this year. These include Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Gurugram, Chandigarh, Bangalore, Ahmadabad, Jamnagar, Hyderabad, Pune, Lucknow and Gandhinagar. The 5G trials were initially conducted at these places, which is why people who are based in these places will first get 5G.

In an official release, the Centre notified that indigenous 5G testbed project, funded by the telecom department, has reached the final stages and the project is likely to be completed by December 31, 2021.

So 5G subscribers will be able to see 5G launch in selected urban areas metros and big cities first, but, according to analysts, network expansion to other parts of the country will take another couple of years. It has also been asserted that 5G will see a rapid rollout, unlike 4G, wherein the services were launched in a few cities, and it took a new entrant (Jio) for operators to expand nationwide.

However, to extend ubiquitous 5G network connectivity in India, it is important to provide the right infrastructure i.e., small cells and in-buildings solutions or fiber, and ensure smooth implementation of rules under the ‘Right of way’ policy. There are still a lot of challenges that India will face in 2022 before the rollout of 5G.

5G’s greatest potential lies in making other industry sectors more energy efficient

Som Satsangi   
SVP and Managing Director
Hewlett Packard Enterprise, India  

Enterprises are increasingly looking at the promise of a customized 5G experience for low-latency, dedicated capacity, extended range and security across campus and industrial environments, whilst complementing existing Wi-Fi networks. Although 5G far surpasses Wi-Fi in terms of wide area coverage, Wi-Fi has the edge when it comes to cost-effective, indoor connectivity.

With its speed and agility and information at the edge, 5G technology is going to disrupt almost all industries. HPE plays an important role in advancing edge-to-cloud platform as-a-service strategy and uniquely brings together both enterprise and telco solutions that can bridge from the enterprise edge, across the telco network into multiple clouds.

HPE is extending its leadership in enterprise connectivity with unique capabilities for private networking across both 5G and Wi-Fi, enabling new enterprise and industrial applications from edge to cloud. With private 5G technology from HPE, customers can uniquely enjoy the best of both worlds with seamless interworking across both private 5G and Wi-Fi.

The private 5G solution from HPE is based on HPE 5G Core Stack, an open, cloud-native, container-based 5G core network solution. It has been enriched with new capabilities for private networking including modular operation and automation, an enterprise self-service portal, agile configuration and change management.

We have been partners to almost all telecom operators in India for their 4G rollout, and are now working with them for their 5G expansion plans to ensure they have the right technologies ahead of the 5G spectrum auction in India later this year.
 The solution supports a range of deployment types based on customer needs. The combination of HPE’s private 5G solution together with Aruba wireless technologies enables telcos and enterprises to extend Wi-Fi with private cellular networking. HPE is pushing the envelope in developing synergies between Wi-Fi and 5G in order to lead the industry with seamless, secure mobility between cellular and enterprise networks with carrier-grade Quality of Service.

5G rollout in India will be a massive step for the digital transformation of the country

Saurabh Tewari 
Director & Chief Technology Officer (Telecom) - Dell Technologies, India

“As India prepares to launch 5G, Dell Technologies has several telecom software, solutions and service offerings to help Communications Service Providers (CSPs) accelerate their open, cloud-native network deployments and create new revenue opportunities at the edge. Dell Technologies provides the expertise and telecom solutions and services for CSPs to transform and modernize their operations and networks. Our global leadership in IT infrastructure, flexible consumption models and a secure global supply chain allows CSPs to scale efficiently and cost effectively.

Our Bare Metal Orchestration software offers customers the breadth and scale to automate deployment and management of large volumes of infrastructure across geographic locations to support ORAN and 5G deployments.

With the arrival of 5G technology, businesses across India will experience higher speeds and improved efficiency. If the organization has a digital-first approach, many of the manual tasks will transform into digital processes organically. The improved speed and lower latency would also enable more expansive AI, IoT, and edge computing technologies in organizations and accelerate their adoption in sectors like manufacturing, consumer electronics, transportation etc.

For India’s farming and food production community, precision agriculture can help create efficiencies like never before, through providing real-time, high-speed communications among sensors and devices, enhancing business and consumer experience and choice. We will be making headways in healthcare where IoT and AI will be leveraged to provide better services. 

However, these developments will create an environment where data needs to be stored, secured, and analysed in a protected space. Better data protection solutions cloud and data storage infrastructure will be an imperative need. Organizations will also be adopting As-a-Service models, and the technology companies should prepare to offer flexible, cost-effective solutions to the businesses.

No doubt, once implemented, 5G will become a turning point for businesses, providing the latency and speed to deliver previously impossible services and products. This will enable large-scale innovation that will transform society.” 

5G is the most natively secured mobile generation

Rajesh Maurya
Regional Vice President, India & SAARC, Fortinet

“The game-changing benefits of 5G can only be realized if properly secured. Digital innovation in mobile networks creates a dual role for security in mobile environments. It provides internal mobile-infrastructure security and external use-case security and monetization.
Fortinet provides a common set of security solutions and tools that provide end-to-end security visibility and control for 4G and 5G mobile infrastructure, while enabling industry use cases’ security and monetization. This approach facilitates integration and onboarding while keeping operations and management efforts to a minimum as the same platform is constantly used throughout the 5G ecosystem.

Fortinet’s next generation firewalls not only protects the mobile carrier signalling, roaming, charging, and internet interfaces with our 5G-ready FortiGate series, but also provides secure transport for backhaul and fronthaul traffic. These specialized tools provide the ability to build an integrated security framework that optimizes the cost of launching and operating new services and revenue opportunities and enhances the ability to achieve service level goals, all while mitigating advanced threats.

The security foundations laid out in the 5G standards can only be a starting point for a security blueprint that secures end-to-end 5G-enabled innovation and use cases.  5G networks will therefore need a solution that will provide comprehensive protection at 5G speeds without compromising end-to-end visibility, automation, and enforcement throughout the ecosystem’s attack surface.  

Fortinet’s diverse portfolio and in-depth security experience across enterprises (IT), mobile network operators, operational technologies (OT), and IIoT/IoT has resulted in a uniform, practical, and flexible platform framework that is ideal for implementing security for 5G ecosystems. Unlike any other solution, the Fortinet Security Fabric enables the building and deploying of a comprehensive shared security responsibility model that supports both 5G providers and their enterprise customers across all use cases.”

Palo Alto Network is helping turn 5G into a highly secured network  

 
Huzefa Motiwala  
Director - Systems Engineering for India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks

“5G promises a completely transformative mobility through the entire enhanced mobile broadband experience. We firmly believe that the way it is going to be delivered is very different, in terms of, right from distributed computing, multi edge computing to the core network. From our perspective, Palo Alto Networks is bringing our many years of securing the network experience, the network cloud and devices to the 5G world. We are trying to enable the service providers and enterprises to turn 5G into a highly secured network. So in the process, we are offering a few solutions and these are all industry firsts - one is the entire 5G stack infra which is built on Cloud native architecture. So we have inbuilt containerized 5G security which is designed to secure this highly distributed 5G network, which includes the edge cloud, and, of course, multi-vendor & multi cloud. The second thing which we are bringing to the table is the real time correlation of threats to the 5G subscriber and 5G equipment. Real time correlation of threats can actually help identify which subscriber or which device or machine might be the target of an attack. This in a way helps in the complete forensic and accelerated investigation; this is unique because you are going right to the last mile to identify the threat, which is not possible in today's world.

The third piece is, because natively the 5G networks are allowing service providers to offer a dedicated end-to-end piece of the entire network, so the service provider who is using this backbone 5G infra can completely secure this and offer a dedicated end-to-end piece of network.  

We believe in protecting the end-to-end 5G infra across all layers, locations (distributed, cloud native, multi-cloud architecture), and this single platform helps gain a lot of context driven security to the most granular level for the entire 5G infra. it is also generating a revenue stream for the service providers, because they can now upsell security offerings on top of their connectivity to the customer, to provide the security as a service offering.”

With 5G, there will be the next shift in scale of data from exabytes to zettabytes

Sameer Bhatia  
Director of Asia Pacific Consumer Business Group, and Country Manager for India & SAARC - Seagate Technology

“The emergence of 5G technology promises to facilitate a fundamental shift in how the world uses networks and works with data. Thanks to its speed and greater bandwidth at the edge, 5G will unleash the power of the Internet of Things (IoT), enabling connections by more than a million devices per square mile. The increased power of 5G networks will open up a whole new set of IoT capabilities at the edge for just about every industry, from banking and finance to agriculture and manufacturing.

The business use cases for 5G will range from enhanced logistics  more fuel-efficient self-driving trucks, for example  to more robust video conferencing connectivity. Businesses and consumers will also benefit from the next iteration of 5G-enabled smart cities.

The growth of 5G will facilitate an evolution of IT infrastructure to accommodate the increase in connected devices and in data generated. The creation and consumption of data will be catalyzed by enabling technologies like 5G, which make it cheaper, faster, and easier to get more data from endpoints into processing locations. What we see is the next shift in scale of data, from exabytes to zettabytes.

Having said that, companies in just about every industry sector need to focus their efforts on integrating 5G first into IT infrastructures that are supporting data and processes that are time-sensitive in nature. This is where data at the edge and 5G can add the most immediate value. IT leaders should also be precise and specific about which types of data will be most valuable to their organization in order to configure their technology stack and strategy accordingly.

Finally, it’s critical that IT leaders work in tandem with operations, finance, and other departments in order to ensure a cohesive strategy for managing and using the massive flood of data 5G allows. Companies need to prepare now to efficiently handle an onslaught of 5G data in ways that align with their core mission and strategy.”

5G will bring in increased economic opportunities for various sectors

Sanjeev Mehtani
Chief Sales Officer - Acer India

“Acer as a technology first brand was the first brand to launch a 5G laptop in 2021 - the Acer Spin 7 Convertible Laptop enabled with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2.

As we all know 5G services will roll out in select cities of India in 2022. This year we will see a lot of developments in this sector. Several launches of 5 G-enabled products are expected this year. The power, bandwidth, and speed of 5G products will transform how businesses work. The industry will also become more resilient and competitive. This will increase the demand for 5G products and encourage us to bring more options, innovations, and opportunities to the industry. 5G is also a great push for the gaming industry, it facilitates innovative gaming products with real-time capabilities, when blended with AR and VR it enhances the experience.

5G brings in increased economic opportunities for various sectors like healthcare, education, transportation, IT, manufacturing, energy, etc. While 4G was equipped with high speed, 5G will be labeled as a milestone in the history of technology. At Acer, we are already working towards this and products that support 5G. We look forward to offering more innovative and user-friendly products in the 5G segment.

Intuitively, people might think with such powerful technology 5G might consume more energy. But that is not the case. The rollout of 5G will provide more opportunities for countries to develop new and powerful technologies and yet conserve the environment. With advancements in the industry, 5G can reduce greenhouse emissions and enable and enhance the incorporation of renewable energy. The impact of 5G on the environment will stack up as technology reaches a greater number of sectors and helps in the integration of new technologies.”

5G brings transformational changes to the core network with a cloud-native approach
 

Harish Kumar
Head, Enterprise & Government, Check Point Software Technologies, India & SAARC

“5G brings transformational changes to the core network with a modular and cloud-native approach. With advent of 5G, the traditional telco network architecture migrates to Service-Based Architecture (SBA), similar to the modern enterprise architectures, wherein network elements are deployed as VNF or CNF functions. However, it also makes the architecture and platform prone to IP attacks like DDoS, and cyber security attacks like MiTM. Also, the cloud infrastructure is prone to security misconfigurations.

The new Check Point Cloudguard portfolio is well poised to handle the security aspects of the new SBA based 5G architecture, catering to the security of container network functions and application functions and governance of workloads across multi-cloud environments.
To empower our customers with gold standard product solutions, Check Point Software incorporates AI in its unified, multi-layered security architecture to provide an ever-improving intelligent system that detects and prevents complex and sophisticated first seen attacks.
In 2022, we have recalibrated our Check Point portfolio of products to focus on those technologies and capabilities that will provide uncompromised security based on our three core principles. Check Point Software has taken over 80 products and technologies and organized them into three main pillars: Check Point Harmony, Check Point Cloud Guard, and Check Point Quantum, all managed by Check Point Infinity-Vision, the industry’s leading unified security management solution.

For the last three decades, Check Point has been a leading vendor in the business of securing IT and IP networks from cyber-attacks. We have a top of mind recall with S/W OEMs, ISVs, MSSPs, cloud & network service providers and enterprise & commercial clients. Hence, it presents a huge opportunity for us to work with these organizations and contribute to the development of a secure 5G network architecture.” 

5G presents great opportunities for telecom operations and enterprise customers

Ananda Sengupta, Telecom Business Unit Head, Nagarro

“The combination of advanced applications such as AR/VR, large scale IoT networks, and the utilisation of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning technologies designed for 5G networks will revolutionise life as we know it. Nagarro has been working extensively on building applications as well as infrastructure for 5G. We have already created a solution portfolio for the 5G space, especially 5G for enterprise. Recently our team also designed a “Factory in a Box” over 5G networks with a leading European 5G network equipment manufacturer.

We believe that 5G will result in a major growth of exciting applications in the consumer and enterprise space – enabled by the service providers and corporates alike. 5G will especially enable tech companies to develop new solutions in healthcare, energy, manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture for many years to come.

By enabling the deployment of AI and IoT networks at scale, 5G will make electrical grids more efficient and increase sustainability in both the supply and demand side. This will result in more cost-effective energy transmission. However, we must understand that the whole system needs to be appropriately optimised to achieve these savings.

We are very excited by the possibilities 5G technology is bringing to the table. Our engineers are already leveraging it to build solutions in Edge Computing, IoT, and Industry 4.0. 5G presents great opportunities in telecom operations as well as for the enterprise customers, who will use it for their internal networks to run business applications which need high bandwidth, low latency, massive scale of IoT sensors, along with mobility. Nagarro will especially be an active player in the 5G space for Enterprise businesses.”

5G’s greatest potential lies in making other industry sectors more energy efficient

Vikram Puranik, Vice President – Engineering and Head of Consumer, Communications and Media, GlobalLogic

“Being a leader in the Digital Transformation space, GlobalLogic has demonstrated its expertise in the telecom domain through its services and offerings. We design, build, and deploy cutting-edge technology solutions for 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), and Security at the Edge to not only embrace this growing market, but also pave the way for digital innovations. Moreover, a significant revenue comes from Telco's, MVNO's, Network and Tech ISV in Telecom Domain.

GlobalLogic is enabling its customers to employ and scale their 5G transformation roadmap with following key offerings –

· Building Next Gen Software Defined Network Functions for 5G

· Setting up 5G test labs with home grown and partner enabled simulators/emulators

· Enabling and Enhancing B2B business for carriers: Carrier Partner Development platforms

· BSS and OSS Modernization in 5G World

· 5G Edge Consumer Use Cases

· Building carrier and Public Networks (5G ORan)

5G holds the power to revolutionize IoT, and transform the way we live, conduct business, and everyday work. Not just that, but 5G is empowering enterprises with absolute control, speed, security to redefine customer, digital, and employee experience.

5G’s greatest potential lies in making other industry sectors more energy efficient. Together with virtualization, edge computing, AI-enabled analytics, and cloud computing, 5G provides a platform that can help make industries and cities become more energy-efficient and sustainable.

5G will support the massive number of devices that will simultaneously access the network, which will be far more than what 4G LTE can handle. As 5G enables IoT applications, like health care, education, energy, and transportation, it is imperative that they operate as anticipated, without fail, every time. As a key player in the technology, we look forward to working with industry players and partners in bringing this technology to life.”