How 5G Will Transform India? Here’s Everything You Need To Know About 5G

When compared to the other large economies, India was rather slow to adopt 5G. But no one here is loudly complaining, as 4G services here are among the cheapest in the world.

Jio shook the telecom industry when it launched its 4G services back in September 2016, with free calls and data until March 2017.

As more people started checking for the ‘4G’ tag while buying new smartphones, Jio got millions of new subscribers. The competition was quick to follow suit with prices matching that of Jio, despite launching 4G way before Jio, albeit with exorbitant price tags.?

The price of 1 GB 4G data fell from ? 250 to less than ? 10.?

India entered a new digital age when people became liberal with using data. More people started YouTube channels; it was the rise of Indian influencers. Streaming movies became a thing and social media changed from a platform to exchange pictures and occasional videos to a completely video-centric industry.?

Digital payments, live streaming, stock market investments, and cloud gaming are at an all-time high and all this is destined to increase and improve as 5G just hit India.

5G Launch in India

On October 1, 2022, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi officially launched the roll-out of commercial 5G Services in India.?

However, 5G services will not be readily available in the whole country. 5G will be completely functional in India only in the next 2 to 3 years.

Most people mistake 5G for just a faster version of 4G, but that is not the way the Indian government and business tycoons think of 5G. No wonder the total 5G spectrum auctions were upwards of 1.5 lakh crores of Indian rupees!??

5G marks the beginning of yet another digital revolution in India.?

Here's everything you need to know…

What is 5G?

5G is the fifth generation of cellular networks, assuring unprecedented opportunities for people and businesses.

Before learning about what 5G is capable of, let’s have a look at the underlying technology of 5G. To start with, the 5G spectrum lies between 0.6 GHz and 40 GHz of the Electromagnetic Spectrum.

5G Technology

There are 5 new technologies that form the foundation of True 5G network (true 5G is the standalone 5G network that doesn’t use existing 4G infrastructure).

• Millimeter Waves

As the network frequency for smartphones and other electronic gadgets falls under a specific range that is somewhere between 800MHz and 6GHz, it is starting to get crowded, and consequently, the network is getting slower.

This is where 5G comes with millimeter waves, which are radio waves between 24GHz and 100GHz. 5G is the fastest when it is used with millimeter waves. But millimeter waves are easily obstructed by buildings and get absorbed by trees and rain.

To get around this issue, Small Cell technology is used????

• Small Cell

Instead of using large high-powered cell towers to broadcast signals over long distances, low-powered mini base stations are placed at frequent intervals to broadcast millimeter waves over short distances without hitting any obstacles. These base stations are called small cells.?

• Massive MIMO

4G base stations consist of a dozen ports through which all cellular traffic is handled. Massive MIMO base stations can support up to 100 ports. MIMO stands for Multiple Input Multiple Output.

This could increase the capacity of the network by a factor of 22 or more. But this comes with a downside.?

Cellular antennas broadcast signals in all directions and all these extra ports can cause serious interference between the signals. This problem is tackled with Beamforming technology???

• Beamforming

Instead of broadcasting in every direction, beamforming allows base stations to send a focused stream of data to a specific user. This precision prevents interference and is way more efficient. This allows stations to handle more incoming and outgoing data streams at once.?

The massive MIMO base station receives signals from all users and keeps track of their timing and direction of arrival. It then uses advanced signal processing algorithms to triangulate exactly where each signal is coming from and plots the best transmission route to each user. This is how beamforming works.???

• Full Duplex

The basic antennas in today’s base stations can only transmit or receive at one time. This is because of a principle called reciprocity, which is the tendency for radio waves to travel both forward and backward along the same frequency. Naturally, this would cause interference and disrupt the information in the signal.

Full duplex systems in 5G technology support high-speed transistor switches that stop the backward roll of signals, enabling antennas to transmit and receive at the same time in the same frequency. This means the network capacity doubles at the most fundamental physical layer.???

Although it looks like 5G is designed specifically for normal consumers to get faster internet, there is much more to it. To understand this, let’s take a look at how wireless mobile technology evolved…

History of Mobile Technology | From 1G to 5G

• 1G brought in the ability to place phone calls without any wires, for the first time. But the mobile phones were brick-sized and were only useful for very short conversations.
• 2G introduced a more efficient technology that drastically decreased the size of mobile phones and most importantly brought with it SMS functionality and as the technology further developed, it showcased mobile data services.
• By the time 3G came to India, smartphones became a thing and along with it came social media apps, shopping apps, YouTube, and higher-quality mobile games. This ushered in the era of high-speed internet access but was strictly limited by pricy services, even though there were several network providers in the market.
• 4G was stagnant at first but quickly gained momentum and completely changed the way Indians used data. It also took out a lot of players and is now dominated by Jio, closely followed by Airtel and then Vodafone-Idea (Vi) in the third position.
• The promise of 5G goes beyond smartphones. It is the technology that will take us closer to the cities of the future flaunted in sci-fi movies. From VR headsets to driverless cars, 5G will be the invisible thread that connects and powers next-generation gadgets.????

How is 5G better than 4G?

Here are the reasons why 5G is better than 4G:

• 5G is substantially quicker than 4G, capable of reaching speeds of up to 20Gbps.
• 5G has a higher capacity than 4G as it can support a 100x increase in network traffic.
• 5G has drastically reduced latency than 4G. The theoretical latency of 5G is just 1 ms as opposed to 20 to 30 ms for 4G.
• 5G is a more capable unified platform than 4G. While the purpose of 4G was to provide a faster and better internet experience to smartphones, 5G opens up a world of new services like mission-critical communications and the massive IoT.
• 5G makes greater use of spectrum than 4G. With its spectrum from 800MHz to 2100MHz, 4G is much less efficient than 5G, which is designed to fully utilize every bit of the spectrum from 700MHz to 26GHz. For example, 5G can use the lower 700MHz band to get a larger coverage area and stack a higher energy band on top of it to get true 5G speed.?

How 5G will change the Indian Landscape

Rural Development

Rural areas do not have access to reliable internet connections and are therefore unarmed for development. Setting up a fiber optic network in these areas is an expensive proposition. But 5G is about to change that with Fixed Wireless Access.

FWA refers to high-speed broadband connections using mobile networks. FWA simply replaces the fiber optic cables between homes and the network with wireless 5G signals. 5G FWA, unlike 4G, can provide speeds similar to that of fiber networks, thereby connecting homes and businesses in rural areas with the rest of the world, and accelerating their development in the process.????

Gaming, and Entertainment

With 5G coming to smartphones, the gaming industry is going to witness a massive boom, especially in cloud gaming. Since all the processing takes place on the servers, users won’t even need a powerful gaming console. The lower latency helps online multiplayer gamers have a lag-free experience.

Virtual Reality headsets will open up a whole new perspective to media consumption. 2025 will be the year when major organizations launch their VR/AR devices that look and feel nothing like the ones we have today. They will be slim, lightweight, and always connected to a 5G network for advanced processing.

Live sports broadcasting will get a more immersive viewing experience with the ability to watch from multiple camera angles and switch between them in real time.??

Immersive Education

After 100s of years of following the same teaching style, schools and colleges are about to get a massive makeover. Smart classrooms will go beyond a projector and screen and would instead have AR headsets that display highly interactive educational content with great visual fidelity right before their eyes.

Holographic telepresence would allow a teacher from any part of the world to be virtually beamed to schools even in remote locations, provided they have 5G FWA and the required AR headsets.

Smart Homes

IoT devices that made homes “smart”, started gaining momentum when broadband Wi-Fi became an absolute necessity for urban households. But as the number of connected devices is on a steep rise, the limited capacity and finite range of Wi-Fi signals are forcing it to be outdated.

Imagine a smart refrigerator that knows your shopping pattern; it sees that you are out of apples and so orders them from the nearest supermarket, along with completing the payment from your weekly shopping budget, that you have already set on your budget planner app on your smartphone.?

The market receives your order and within a few minutes, a 5G connected food delivery drone drops off apples at your doorstep, and that’s when your smart doorbell recognizes that your order has arrived and sends a notification to your smartphone telling you that your apples have arrived.

This is not the far future. In fact, the technology is already up and running, all it needed was 5G connectivity and now that it’s here, our lives are about to get a lot easier.??????

Advanced Manufacturing

We have already moved to large-scale manufacturing with automation and cutting-edge robotics, but 5G would take it to a whole new level. Collaborative robots would make manufacturing fast and efficient.

AR remote assistance enhances collaboration between experts and field workers. It also allows field officers to get fast and effective real-time solutions. Autonomous transport robots will be able to move faster and more accurately through the factory floors.

Medicine and Healthcare

Clinical researchers can use the advanced processing power of machine learning servers from different locations, channeled through 5G internet. Pharma manufacturing companies can make use of remote maintenance to ensure the quality and longevity of medicines.

Fully digital hospitals can become a reality with super-fast data transmission within various departments.?

Remote consultation and diagnostics will take a giant leap, as high-resolution 5G video conferencing and zero latency data transfer from sensors attached to patients opens up the possibilities of connected ambulances even in rural areas where hospitals are far away.

Automotive Industry

HD maps and hyper-precise location services in 5G connected cars will make navigation a much more reliable experience. The in-built infotainment system will be capable of playing cloud games and Netflix, even while you’re on the road.

And perhaps the most noteworthy upgrade with 5G would be self-driving cars. Real-time monitoring and analysis of the speed, location, and destination of each vehicle on the road can be beamed to every other vehicle nearby without any lag through 5G network, thus enabling vehicle-to-vehicle communications, which in theory, would make self-driving cars safer than human-driven cars.

Smart Infrastructure

From garbage to traffic to energy, gathering data to improve quality of life, while reducing environmental impact is what makes a city truly smart. But the only practical way to support the vast number of IoT devices and sensors needed for a smart city is through 5G.

Adding 5G connectivity to services allows them to be run at lower costs, with better efficiency, and tailored to the people’s needs. Government-run operations can easily adopt Industry 4.0 standards using 5G network and thereby enhance security in their operations.

5G also allows connectivity to public transport systems enabling real-time location and passenger count data for commuters in the city.

5G Challenges in India

While India is one of the largest smartphone markets in India, the vast majority of mobile phone users are still holding on to 4G devices. An even bigger population, especially in rural areas, use 2G feature phones and are probably unaware of the benefits 5G brings to the table.

The initial roll-out of 5G services would stick to the present-day tariff plans of 4G, but telecom service providers would slowly increase the price of 5G to get back the huge sum of money they’ve spent to buy 5G spectrum and to set up the required 5G infrastructure.?

5G infrastructure and 5G supported devices are tied up in a chicken-and-egg situation. The delay in the development of 5G infrastructure by telecom providers is making 5G uncompelling for people and the delay in people’s adoption of 5G services is driving up the cost of implementation of 5G infrastructure.

There is also the added cost for businesses to convert their existing framework to a 5G-ready configuration. A survey conducted by EY shows that 50% of enterprises are still unclear about 5G policies and regulations.

As 5G drastically increases the amount of data collected from people and businesses, there’s always a higher risk of cyber-attacks and data breaches.???

Final Thoughts

While deploying 5G on a large scale has its own challenges, we are definitely not far away from a world where 5G becomes mainstream. Telecom companies like Jio and Bharti Airtel are pouring every bit of their resources to win the 5G race.?

Lag-free cloud computing experiences will drive the sales of AR headsets, making them cheaper than flagship smartphones. Likewise, many nuanced technologies would become less expensive.??

As all devices are connecting to the internet, the next data boom will be created more by machines than by people. All this data needs to be streamed, stored, processed, and analyzed by other machines in real time, leading to a massive surge in data centers. All this capability will change every industry we know and would give rise to a whole new set of industries we haven’t even thought about yet.

In less than 5 years' time, 5G would be like electricity, you’d expect it everywhere and every device you own would use it in some way or the other.