According to a senior telecom official, India is set to roll out 5G services completely by 2022, a Bloomberg report said. The next generation of mobile network technologies will make its debut in South Korea and will arrive there by March next year.
Telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan said in an interview in Delhi, “We are not there yet. 5G won’t be driven by supply, it’ll be driven by demand and the rest of industry needs to wake up to this.”
India has lagged behind other countries in embracing leading technologies. Even the 4G network arrived three years later after it was commercially available in 2009.
5G technology will arrive within the next two years in Japan and China. The high-speed technology will play an important role in the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan of Digital India and Smart Cities.
Sundararajan emphasized the importance of 5G technology by saying “If we want smart cities, clearly we need smart infrastructure for it,” She also added that the testing process of the latest technology might begin by 2020.
According to a Hong Kong-based analyst Christopher Lane, the late arrival of 5G technology in India is for the best.
“India needs China to launch to drive economies of scale and lower cost 5G handsets. I think 2022 or later is appropriate for India,” said Lane.
South Korea recently tested the technology during the Winter Olympics organized in February this year and is set to organize airwaves auction to deploy 5G services in the country commercially.
5G technology is touted to bring massive improvements in the download speeds and power consumption while utilizing data. The soaring download speeds would be helpful for autonomous vehicles, drones, remotely assisted surgeries and traffic control.
As a matter of fact, India has failed in providing the complete benefits of 4G technology to users. According to a list compiled by OpenSignal earlier this year, India has the slowest 4G speed amongst 88 countries of the world. The average 4G speed in India is 6 Mbps which is lesser than the 4G speed in countries like Pakistan, Algeria, and Japan.
Are you satisfied with the 4G speed in your area? Do you think India would get the ‘real’ 5G by 2022? Express your views in the comments sections.
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