PM Modi to launch 5G services in India today; here’s everything you need to know

According to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), it is planned to launch 5G services at 10 a.m. Saturday at an event held at Pragati Maidan in the nation’s capital.

Capable of supporting ultra-high-speed internet, the fifth generation or 5G service is expected to unlock new economic opportunities and societal benefits, serving as a transformational force for Indian society.

Earlier, Communications Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw also said that Prime Minister Modi’s vision is to build 5G parallel to global standards and lead the world in 6G technology.

The cumulative economic impact of 5G on India is estimated at USD 450 billion by 2035.

According to the Ministry of Communications, the launch of 5G services follows years of intense preparation. Recently, 5G spectrum auction was successfully conducted and 51,236 MHz was allocated to telecom service providers with a gross revenue of ₹1,50,173 crore.

The auction bundled the demand for a robust 5G ecosystem capable of meeting its use cases involving IoT, M2M, AI, Edge Computing, robotics, and more.

Besides launching 5G, PM Modi will also inaugurate the 6th edition of India Mobile Congress 2022 (IMC-2022) to be held from 1-4 October at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi.

Here’s how Jio, Airtel and Vodafone Idea will demonstrate 5G in India

The three major telecom operators in the country will each present a use case to the Prime Minister to show the potential of 5G technology in India.

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio will match a teacher from a school in Mumbai with students from three different locations in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Odisha.

This, according to official sources, will demonstrate how 5G will facilitate education by bringing teachers closer to students, erasing the physical distance between them. He will demonstrate the power of on-screen augmented reality (AR) and how it is being used to teach children across the country, remotely, without the need for an AR device.

In the Airtel demo, a girl from Uttar Pradesh will attend a vivid and immersive educational experience to learn about the solar system using virtual reality and augmented reality. The girl will share her learning experience with the Prime Minister by appearing on the slides through a hologram.

The Vodafone Idea test case will demonstrate the safety of workers in a Delhi Metro tunnel under construction through the creation of a ‘digital twin’ of the tunnel on the slide. The digital twin will help provide real-time worker safety alerts from a remote location.

Modi will take a live demo of the slides to monitor the work in real time through the use of virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

The various use cases that will be presented to the Prime Minister in the exhibition include drone-based precision agriculture; highly secure routers and AI-based cyber threat detection platforms; automated guided vehicles; smart ambulances; augmented reality/virtual reality/mixed reality in education and skills development; wastewater monitoring system; smart-agri program and health diagnosis, among others.

5G offers several times the speed of 4G, supports lag-free connectivity, and can enable billions of connected devices to share data in real time.

This will help provide seamless coverage, high data rate, low latency, and highly reliable communications. Also, it will increase power efficiency, spectrum efficiency and network efficiency.

5G technology will help connect billions of Internet of Things devices, enable higher quality video services with high-speed mobility, the provision of critical services such as telesurgery and self-driving cars, among others.

It will contribute to real-time disaster monitoring, precision agriculture, minimizing the role of humans in hazardous industrial operations such as deep mining, offshore activities, etc. Unlike existing mobile communication networks, 5G networks will allow the requirements to be tailored for each of these different use cases within a single network.

In addition to powering ultra-low latency connections, which allow high-quality videos or movies to be downloaded to a mobile device in seconds (even in crowded areas), 5G can enable solutions such as healthcare online, connected vehicles, etc. – immersive augmented reality and metaverse experiences, life-saving use cases and advanced mobile cloud gaming, among others.

“5G can unlock new economic opportunities and societal benefits, giving it the potential to be a transformative force for Indian society. It will help the country overcome traditional barriers to development, boost startup innovations and business ventures as well as advancing India’s digital vision,” the official statement reads.

The launch of 5G services in India, the world’s second largest smartphone market after China, follows years of intense preparation.

India’s largest-ever telecom spectrum auction recently broke a record ₹1.5 lakh crore bids, with Mukesh Ambani’s Jio hogging almost half of all airwaves sold with a ₹Offer of 88,078 crores.

Telecom tycoon Sunil Bharti Mittal Bharti Airtel has made a successful bid on ₹43,084 crores, while Vodafone Idea Ltd bought spectrum for ₹18,799 crores.

Gautam Adani’s group, whose entry into the auction was touted by some as another flashpoint in the rivalry with Ambani, paid ₹212 crores for 400 MHz. The Adani Group has purchased spectrum in the 26 GHz band, which is suitable for setting up a private network for end-to-end communication.

The auction bundled the demand for a robust 5G ecosystem capable of addressing its use cases involving IoT (Internet of Things), M2M (machine-to-machine communication), AI (artificial intelligence), advanced computing and robotics.

The Department of Telecommunications amended the Right of Way (RoW) rules in August 2022, in which fees for permissions to lay cables and install towers were made reasonable and a cap was set on the rates of installation of 5G small cells and fiber optic cables. on street furniture.

The Department of Telecommunications set up a 5G test bed with the help of IIT, IISc Bengaluru and SAMEER to develop the technology in 2018.

A 5G hackathon was launched in 2020 to spark ideation and prototyping of use cases by startups and led to boosting innovative products, according to the official statement.

An interministerial committee on 5G use cases has been operating since 2021, in coordination with 12 central ministries, allowing the establishment of 5G use case laboratories. Industry consultations have taken place allowing the 5G ecosystem to deliver handsets.

C-DOT is also developing a 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) in collaboration with local industry and startups. It has already successfully tested 4G Core in collaboration with TCS and Tejas Networks.

“All of these will help answer the Prime Minister’s call on ‘Jai Anusandhan.’ to innovative and impactful 5G use cases,” the statement said.

(With PTI entries)