According to a recent article by the Economic
Times, Indian Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan stated that the country
wants to take a lead position in adopting 5G technology and will prepare the
road map for it by June this year.
Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan, speaking at an event
organised by industry body Cellular Operators'
Association of India (COAI), said 5G will unleash transformative
capabilities, and have a bearing in areas like network virtualisation, cloud,
and data analytics amongst others.
“I wonder whether we are correct in
calling 5G as next generation. It represents next order of capabilities. The
capabilities that it will unleash, are transformative,” Secretary Sundararajan said.
She called upon industry, academia and startups to do their bit to
help India become a “frontrunner” in 5G wireless system which enables higher
speed mobile broadband, mission-critical services and massive Internet of
Things (IoT) deployment.
“A high-level forum on 5G which
includes global experts, industry experts, IITs, IISc, has already commenced
work and done a fair amount of deliberation. By June, India will have full
roadmap ready on this,” she said.
Formed in September last year, the high-level forum on 5G
is deliberating on the vision, goals, and 5G roadmap and will look at related
areas of spectrum policy, regulatory regime and pilot programmes.
Terming 5G as important for India's massive “digitisation and digitalisation” efforts, Secretary
Sundararajan said it would enable the country to
overcome several decades of infrastructure-related challenges.
At the COAI event, Sundararajan
also said that while the country had lagged in 2G, 3G and 4G technology
adoption, it does not want to left behind in 5G and, in fact, would like to
push the global momentum around 5G through design capabilities, innovation and
ability to build affordable solutions.
As previously
reported, the Indian Government has plans to roll out 5G by 2020. At
the same time, it was also announced that
5G test beds are being set up at the Indian Institutes of Technology in Delhi
and Chennai.