India’s 5G technology, TSDSI 5Gi, has completed the evaluation phase of ITU’s International Mobile Telecommunications 2020 (IMT 2020) vision and now conforms with the stringent performance requirement, as stated by ITU. This means that the contribution of India is now being accepted as the global 5G standard.
Director of IIT Kanpur, Prof Abhay Karandikar, who is also the founding member and Chairman of the Telecom Standards Development Society of India (TSDSI), India’s body for telecom standards, stated that global vendors will now make handsets and base stations conforming to this standard.
Two more technologies that have completed the evaluation phase are 3GPP 5G-SRIT and 3GPP 5G-RIT submitted by Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).
During multi-year development and evaluation process by ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R), the technologies were deemed to be sufficiently detailed to enable worldwide compatibility of operation and equipment which includes roaming, according to ITU.
The outcome of the first release of IMT-2020 supporting 5G is a set of terrestrial radio interface specifications which are incorporated into a global standard in ITU-R Recommendation titled ‘Detailed specifications of the radio interfaces of IMT-2020. This is in final approval to the 193 Member States of ITU.
Houlin Zhao, ITU Secretary-General stated that IMT-2020 specifications for fifth generation of mobile communications (5G) will be the backbone of tomorrow’s digital economy, transforming lives and leading industry and society into the automated and intelligent world. He also added that 5G will enable fast data speeds, reliable connectivity and low latency to international mobile telecommunications (IMT), all that is needed for our new global communications ecosystem of connected devices sending huge amounts of data through ultrafast broadband.
The Director of ITU Radiocommunication Bureau, Mario Maniewicz said that the successful completion of the evaluation process and the release of this global standard is a significant milestone for the global telecommunication industry and its users. 5G technologies will also enrich the worldwide communications ecosystem and expand the range of innovative applications and support the burgeoning Internet of Things which includes machine-to-machine communication.
The evaluation of candidate technologies was not carried out only by ITU-R. ITU said that it was a highly collaborative process with substantial input form and coordination with ITU Member States, equipment manufacturers, network operators and also involved national, regional and international standards development organizations, partnerships, the academic community and fora, because ITU-R provides a unique global framework to discuss the capabilities of new radio technologies.