- India has allowed 5G trials. It’s encouraging operators to use 5Gi, a superset with Indian contribution, sending Reliance Jio & Airtel into two opposing camps. At least publicly
- Global telecoms vendors say 5Gi is not compatible with 5G; Indian tech developers say it is. Vendors say it’ll increase the cost, Indian team says it will not
- First time ever India has a seat at the telecoms standards table, but its translation into actual use depends on the giant gear makers
- Will the bogey of ‘fragmentation” be defeated by the merit of tech? The ball is in the 3GPP court
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Having been through many fits and starts over the past year, fifth-generation telecommunications, 5G, is finally approved for field trials in India. In May, the Department of Telecom (DoT) notified the rules for a six-month trial for 5G use and application. Somewhere in the copious text was a recommendation encouraging operators “to conduct trials using 5Gi technology in addition to the already known 5G technology”.
The ‘i’ in 5Gi stands for the tiny contribution that India has made to 5G, a first for the country in telecom standards. Technically, 5Gi is a superset of the global 5G standards; it’s like 5G+, but a good section of the global telecoms vendor community views it as “fragmentation”, something that has “never happened in wireless tech before”.
Unlike other technologies, where standards follow research and development, in telecom, research is encoded into standards first, with products and applications developed later. This is why the process of making telecom standards is a decade-long saga dominated by giant telecom equipment makers and intellectual property (IP) holders such as Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, and Samsung. The latter two Asian vendors have had an impressive run in 5G and rank among the world’s top four 5G patent owners.
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