India to witness multi-billion-dollar 5G infra roll-out

India is set to witness the world’s largest roll-out of 5G infrastructure with multi-billion-dollar being spent by the country’s leading telcos over the next several years. The government is expected to lead in developing the India stack, a network building process that would cover every segment of the economy being digitised with the latest advanced technologies.

India stack is a set of APIs that allows governments, businesses, startups and developers to utilize a unique digital infrastructure to solve the country’s tough problems towards presence-less, paperless and cashless service delivery.

Syed Shahid Hussain, Managing Partner, Financial Services Sector, Asia Pacific, at IBM Consulting said that IBM Consulting is joining international technology groups participating in the large-scale development over several years through strategic partnerships with telcos such as Bharti Airtel and Reliance Group.

The Singapore-based IBM executive said, “We plan to work with Indian telcos, where we have strategic partnerships like Bharti Airtel to bring secured hybrid cloud services through the 5G network to national enterprises. The agreement with Bharti Airtel is there to launch it. For this, both the parties will have to spend billions of dollars. Huge amount of money is being spent by the stakeholders in this ongoing process and it will take over a couple of years.”

He further said that the government is to lead the India stack and incentivise banks and other stakeholders in the ecosystem for the benefits of consumers. On project basis, Shahid said IBM and Bank of Baroda will expand the ‘Baroda Kisan’ app, a one-stop shop for all the needs of the agriculture and farming community that was launched in 2019.

IBM has also partnered with SBI YONO (You Only Need One) app in India, valued at $40 billion. YONO gives SBI an enormous market advantage, combining services, products and features into one mobile app with a platform that could integrate data across third-party products and streamline the customer experience.