PARLIMENTARY PANEL ON 5G

PARLIMENTARY PANEL ON 5G

Subject : Economy

Context : Parliamentary Panel has said that sufficient preparatory work had not been undertaken for introducing 5G services in India and that the country was likely to witness only partial deployment by 2021-end or early 2022.

Concept :

• The committee noted that telcos had submitted 5G trial applications in January, 2020 but that till date, guidelines for trials had not been made clear and there was no set date for commencement of trials.

5G Technology

• 5G or fifth generation is the latest upgrade in the long term evolution (LTE) mobile broadband networks.
• The first generation of networks allowed only mobile voice calls to be made, while the second generation allowed mobile voice calls as well as sending of short text messages.
• It was the third generation or 3G network which allowed web browsing on mobile devices, the speed and latency of which improved with fourth-generation or 4G networks.
• The 5G networks will have even faster speeds with latency down to between 1-10 milliseconds.
• Latency is the time a device takes to communicate with the network, which stands at an average of up to 50 milliseconds for 4G networks across the world.

What does it mean to be 5G ready?

• Globally many companies have been deploying 5G networks across their service areas as early as 2018.
• Not only the network, but the devices will also have to be 5G ready for customers to be able to enjoy the maximum benefits of the latest upgrade in mobile broadband.
• One of the major improvements in 5G is the use of beam tracking to follow all devices on the network to ensure consistent connection in real-time for the device.
• 5G networks are also designed to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) efficient which improves signal throughput for all devices on the network.

Where does India stand on the deployment of 5G?

• Companies, both telecom service providers and their equipment vendors, have completed lab trials of 5G network components but are yet to commence field trials, which were initially scheduled to happen last year.
• For the same, telecom companies are awaiting allocation of test spectrum from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).
• The service providers have already tied up with equipment makers like Nokia, Ericsson, etc for deploying their 5G networks