Industry requires USD 100 billion investment to meet 5G targets

New Delhi: As 5G becomes increasingly integral to industrial businesses and digitalization, the revenue from 5G-enabled digitization in India is expected to reach USD 25.9 billion by 2026. In future millions of smartphone apps will be joined by billions of IoT devices, thus forcing wireless networks to grip for more airwaves.

The 5G Leadership Summit 2018, organized by Konnect Worldwide Business Media Pvt Ltd, culminated on Friday with over 150 delegates discussing India's readiness to usher 5G and the technological sea-change expected with its implementation.

Prof Ashutosh Sharma said; "The overall policy framework has been very positive with net neutrality and added collaboration will enable rationalization of telecom pricing and operations. I hope this will be a catalyst in the 5G evolution from 2022 and 2025."

"Telecom as a sector is vital for the purpose of nation building, investments in last 2 decades from overseas is about 2,50,000 crore. The reason for this number is because there are large ambitions that we have and to invest even more in this sector in the coming 5 years. We are on our way to meeting our 5G targets hoping to attract investments worth 100 billion USD creating 4 million jobs. The latest policy drives on Propel India, Connect India and Secure India through which we hope to expand IoT to 5 billion connected devices and 10 million public WiFi hotspots by 2022, we are very optimistic about it and great work has been done by the industry," said P. Balaji, Director Regulatory & Corporate Affairs, Vodafone India.

"The 5G Leadership summit 2018 is a great forum and platform to assess network-readiness, ability to adopt 5G, and discuss the technological sea-change expected to come, along with issues such as security and infrastructure. 5G will be a driving force for digital India initiatives in the coming years and MediaTek is already in the game with its Helio M70 5G modem, which is expected to launch in 2019. We have been actively participating in 5G technology development with standards bodies and working closely with our customers and partners to make 5G a reality and continue to make great technology available to everyone," added Kuldeep Malik, Director Corporate Sales, India, MediaTek.

The topics discussed at the 5G Indian Leadership Summit included roadmap for deployment, India's focus on 5G transitions and making the market suitable for 5G adoption.