All along India has been a laggard in adopting mobile communication technologies. 3G services started almost a decade after the world had adopted them, while 4G is half-a-decade behind. As India embraces Internet of Things (IoT), it is believed that the country will finally catch up with the world when 5G is deployed.

Nishant Batra, global head of Radio, Site and Indoor at Ericsson, spoke to Anup Jayaram on 5G and its applications.

As the world is looking to adopt 5G, how is Ericsson getting ready?

At the moment, most market momentum is on 4G, but there is an increasing inquisitiveness on 5G. One important thing to notice is the way it is built, as it is incremental over 4G. It is not as if we get rid of 4G to build 5G. It is an overlay but is also, what we call, a plug-in. 5G doesn’t have to be a transformational network, its iterative so 4G, 4G-plus and then 5G happens.

5G will be used for connecting devices rather than connecting people?

We see a lot of use-cases. Here, I am talking global not India. Fixed wireless access is one of the biggest. Then we see massive IoT, which is consumer and industrial IoT-connecting devices. We also see some mission critical applications for 5G because of low latency. There will also be a media and broadband uptake on 5G.

With fixed wireless, I can replace your DSL or fibre connection with a wireless one. So you have full internet and video at home. You can run IPTV and other things on it. It’s a full-integrated video and internet delivery at home. It competes with DTH technology. We will see some fixed wireless access in the world by 2018. Mission critical means getting city infrastructure, defence equipment, and construction equipment being connected. Think of an elevator. It’s connected by the network in a central location, while the processing is done in the building. If you extract processing out of it and process it, because when you press the button on the elevator the decisions of which floor the elevator will go is entirely in that set-up.

How much of this is actually happening or is it still early days?

There are no live 5G networks, everything is in trial. We are in-trails for two years now—Ericsson has publicised engagements with 22 customers. In addition to operators, there are industry partners who are interested in 5G to digitise their business, for example Volvo Construction Equipment—for remote controlling construction equipment which can be used in hazardous conditions. Academia is a big part of the discussion on 5G. There are a lot of industry collaborations as well.

So, we can expect faster connectivity…

Yes, we are talking about 1 Gigabits per seconds (Gbps) to 10Gbps speed. Also, about 10 to 100 times the users that we have on 4G today. So if you have about 6 billion users today, we are talking about 50 billion and beyond on 5G networks. We are talking about critical infrastructure control that means city management, fleet management, smart cars, etc. Another interesting use-case is sensor networks and here battery life is very important criteria. We are aiming that sensor should be able to live for a decade without changing.

So, it improves battery life?

Yes, exactly. It also improves throughput in network. 5G has two flavours; let’s say in India we have 900MHz-1800MHz and the highest spectrum in India today is 2600Mhz. We are talking about 28GHz. The US FCC just announced 39GHz and 60GHz, so they are talking about frequency sets which are at the extreme end of the spectrum and using those for 5G.

Can these bands be used right now?

No, some of them are being used and some are still being thought of as an evolution. It is important to maintain a high contiguous amount of spectrum, say 100- 200 MHz. That kind of contiguity can only be obtained at the higher-end because 900 is already very polluted. To facilitate a rapid evolution of access networks and adoption of services we have announced 5G plug-ins—software-driven innovations that bring essential 5G technology concepts to today’s networks. The first series of 5G plug-ins include Massive MIMO (multiple input multiple output) Plug-IA, which improves the user experience as well as the capacity and coverage of network. Then there is multi-user MIMO, which increases capacity by transmitting data to multiple devices simultaneously using the same time and frequency resources. There is Intelligent Connectivity, which increases the combined data throughput of 4G and 5G resources by enabling the network to robustly anchor and intelligently route data based on application requirements and availability.

So, plug-ins are already in place?

Yes, plug-in tech has been introduced globally. We are going to launch them in India next year. We feel operators who are now actively deploying 4G, will be able to use these as they evolve towards 5G.

What about devices?

Device can be a normal device. Device-dependent technologies take longer to adopt. There are some of these that will come. That is when we go full-5G. That is something we can expect in 2019-20 time frame. That’s not what we are doing now.

On a 28 Ghz the network coverage will be very limited?

Yes, very limited. Most bands in India are auctioned in 40-50 or maximum 75MHz, here we are talking about 3,000 MHz. It’s a different paradigm and the application that the US market is now actively thinking, which is fixed wireless.

Will IoT be run entirely on 5G?

No, we have already seen that 4G will be a very successful technology for IoT. We have launched technology narrow band IoT, which uses extremely thin amount of spectrum and is able to connect thousands of devices on 4G. 5G is an IoT technology and will really take off after that, but world needs IoT now. There are operators who are adding more devices than subscribers in different parts of the world.