IET India Digital Conversation on “Clearing the 5G obstacle course in India”

ETSI participated in IET India Digital Conversation on “Clearing the 5G obstacle course in India”, held online on July 24th, 2020.

At the invitation of IET India, a panel of speakers from different backgrounds gathered online to exchange their views about the issue of “clearing the 5G obstacle course in India” on July 24th, 2020. The session was organized and moderated by IET India as part of their weekly Digital Conversations.

 The speakers were senior officials representing the variety of players of the 5G ecosystem, from standards body to industry users, including service providers and telecoms operators :

  • Adrian Scrase, ETSI’s Chief Technology Officer and Head of the Mobile Competence Centre
  • Deepak Solanki, Industrial, Chief Information Officer - AMEA & ANZ, CNH Industrial-Sandeep Arora, Associate Director, Verizon India
  • TS Narayanan, Chief Information Officer, Colt Technology Services
  • Monika Gupta, Vice President at Cap Gemini and member of IET India Digital Working Group moderated the session.    

The event was followed live by an audience of 180 attendees, representatives of the Indian government, standardization organization and academia and of 70 private companies.

 5G Standardization aspects were covered in ETSI opening presentation, specifically the global 5G Standards roadmap, including R15, R16 and future releases’ features and enhancements. The key advantages of 5G over 4G were captured by Adrian Scrase at the end of the session:

  • Licenced and un-licenced spectrum
  • Public and private networks
  • Use cases beyond broadband mobile, such as machine to machine, industry and manufacturing

 After an interactive and lively discussion among the speakers and responding to questions raised by the audience, some key steps needed to progress 5G in India were formulated :

  • Finding use cases in the B2B and industrial domain relevant to India and beneficial to Indian stakeholders at large
  • Gathering these stakeholders to join forces into extended ecosystems beyond telecom operators to “get it right together”
  • Experimenting, running trial projects and developing a culture of continuous improvement to bring these uses cases to readiness for real life implementation.

The full recording of the Digital Conversation can be viewed (1:11:00 video):

This participation was enabled by InDiCo, in synergy with SESEI, in order to promote the development of 5G global standards in India, by reinforcing cooperation with stakeholders across the 5G ecosystem in India.