5G technology will take at least another 5-6 years to gain momentum and proper establishment in India. Simple reason is that even 5G spectrum allocation is yet to take place for full-fledged trials.
According to IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad:
Spectrum auctions will be held in this calendar year and the trials for 5G services with radiowaves allotted by the ministry will commence in the next 100 days.
This does not sound very promising if we look at how things are currently moving.
The entire 5G ecosystem, which involves original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), infrastructure, spectrum, and edge devices, is currently missing and in such a scenario, various 5G-enabled devices that are now set to see the light of day are redundant for the Indian consumers.
Research Director at Counterpoint Research said, “We expect 5G to reach mainstream in India in 2023 and mass-market starting 2025 or so.”
“This will, however, be much earlier compared to the 3G and 4G era which took at least seven to eight years in India since the first global commercialization for each generation of tech curves.”
Although India is targeting 2020 for 5G rollout but the country is yet stuck between allocation of 5G spectrum to operators even for 5G trial of use cases.
Smartphone operators are on an individual level, 5G trials are slowly picking up with Ericsson, Nokia, Intel and Huawei aiming to invest towards 5G testbeds in India.
“The dynamics are completely different now. We have a mature user base, perfect number of operators (three-four) and undergoing digital transformation at the right time beyond smartphones.”
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), commercial 5G deployments have begun in many regions and while 2019 is very much an introductory year at best, 2020 looks to be the year where 5G begins to ramp up.
IDC expect 5G shipments to reach 8.9 percent of smartphones shipped in 2020, accounting for 123.5 million devices shipped. This is expected to grow to 28.1 percent of worldwide smartphone shipments by 2023.
Ryan Reith, Programme Vice President with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers, said, “To be clear, we don’t think 5G will be the savior in smartphones, but we do see it as a critical evolution in mobile technology.”
To set 5G network, a new network topology is required, including new network elements such as edge computing, core network slicing, and radio network densification.
Currently, 5G is largely deploying in these countries, South Korea, China, Japan, Australia, and the US are leading with 5G large-scale mass deployment.
Problems with 5G setup:
India has much ground to cover in bringing 5G experience for over 600 million Internet users.
A recent report from Gartner said that betting big on Internet of Things (IoT)-based communications and video analytics/streaming, nearly two-thirds of organizations plan to deploy the 5G technology by 2020 but are wary of the lack of readiness of communications service providers (CSPs) in making 5G networks ready by then.
Lamented Sylvain Fabre, Senior Research Director at Gartner, “One major issue that 5G users face is the lack of readiness of communications service providers (CSPs). Their 5G networks are not available or capable enough for the needs of organizations.”