• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Digital Fortress of Information

5G, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence

  • Home
  • AI
    • Artificial Intelligence in Telecom – From Hype to Reality – AI
    • AI vs. Human
    • Incredible Examples Of AI And Machine Learning In Practice
    • Must Have Marketing Skills to Survive in The Age of AI
  • 5G
    • What is 5G? The Ultimate Guide Available on Internet
    • 5 Reasons Why 5G is The Future
    • What is The Difference between 5G and 6G?
    • The Technology of The Year 2020 Will Be 5G
    • How Operators Should Expedite 5G Deployment
    • Evolution of 5G in Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
    • 5G in South Asia: Opportunities & Challenges
    • Beamforming 5G – Mobile Radio With Pinpoint Accuracy
    • Scientists Warn of Health Risks From 5G
  • IoT
    • 5 Ways the IoT Can Change the Business World
    • IoT Data Security Issues Popped up in 2019
    • IoT Security Threats and How to Handle Them
    • Business Internet Of Things | IoT Applications 2019
  • ML
    • Future Technology Predictions 2020
    • Machine Learning Trend To Find Bugs
    • Secret Methods of Applying Text Analytics ( AI and Machine Learning Application )
    • The Present And Future of Machine Learning on Devices
  • Technology
    • Cloud Computing
      • What is Cloud Computing? Explained With Examples!
      • Blade Shadow Cloud Gaming Review
    • AMD
      • AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Stress Test Results – Incredible Performance Show
      • Why AMD Makes Less Sales and Profits in Q2 FY 2019
    • Cyber Security
      • 2019 Onward: Everyday Is Information Cyber Security Day
      • Russian Security Researcher Accessed Xiaomi Furry Tail Pet Smart Feeder
      • FaceApp Aging Challenge: Is FaceApp A Danger To Our Privacy?
    • Tech Business
      • 2 Steps to Ensuring Project Success
      • Public Sector vs Private Sector For IT Professional in EU
      • Healthy Employees Manage Digital Transformation Better
      • How to Protect Production Facilities Effectively in 2020
      • Great Example of Socially Responsible Business
      • Great Example of Socially Responsible Business
    • Tech Facts
      • Cutting Edge Technologies That Will Change Marketing Industry Forever
      • This is How Phone Phishing Scams Try To Fool You
      • Google is Buying Fitbit: Now What?
      • Healthy Employees Manage Digital Transformation Better
      • Privacy and Security is in WhatsApp’s DNA
      • The End of the iPhone? Apple is Planning the Next Big Thing
      • Google Wants to Do More with Chrome
  • Blog
  • Books
You are here: Home / 5G / 5G in South Asia: Opportunities & Challenges

5G in South Asia: Opportunities & Challenges

Imagine 5G in South Asia, 1.891 billion or about one fourth of the world's population, making it both the most populous and the most densely populated geographical region in the world.

Just a year after introducing 4G, the telecom sector in South Asia is turning its attention to move on to the era of 5G. While the gap between these two successive generations of mobile technologies seem quite narrow, 5G’s over-arching impact beyond voice and data has made it a must-have tool to keep South Asia  relevant in the 4th Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0).

Unlike the earlier generations, 5G can bring more than an incremental change for an emerging economy of South Asia . Its underlying architecture has the potential to enable the next wave of productivity and innovation across the subcontinent – thanks to its gigabit speeds, improved network performance and reliability.

However, some of the most talked 5G uses-cases like autonomous vehicles and robotic surgery might not be applicable in context of South Asia. This is because, such futuristic use-cases requires advanced market structure and availability of digital and supporting economic infrastructure. Rather an improvised and contextual 5G would be more appropriate for the country largely driven by digitization and automation needs in the government and business sectors.

5G Overview
Unlike early generations of mobile networks, 5G will represent a significant shift in the telco industry’s focus away from voice and more towards mobile broadband and increased industrial applications. In other words, 5G will be use-case driven. Instead of rolling out a tower and offering voice and data services right away, 5G will solve problems across a range of sectors—including transportation, health, manufacturing and agriculture—using a combination of device, connectivity and application.

5G use cases can be divided into the following 3 categories: a) enhanced Mobile Broadband, b) massive Machine Type Communications, and c) Critical communications. Apart from these use-cases, 5G has the potential to allow tailoring of requirements for each of these use-cases categories within the same network.

Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB)

eMBB is designed to provide an improved “Unlimited” mobile experience for consumers. Superfast 5G networks with peak data rate of >10 Gbps will enable consumers to view rich content in more places, supporting the streaming of live events and high-resolution media. Increased network capacity of 10,000 times compared to today’s networks will support more users, even in crowded areas, such as large public events, and at peak times providing at least 100 Mbps throughput per user.eMBB will likely be the focus of early 5G deployments as it can immediately support the growing communications requirements for an emerging digital economy like South Asia.

Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC)

The mMTC will support widespread and dense deployment of sensors and other network-connected devices enabling massive Internet-of-Things (IoT) deployment, such as asset tracking, smart agriculture, smart cities, energy monitoring, smart home, remote monitoring. The mMTC will significantly reduce the power requirements (battery life of up to 10 years) and provide flexible coverage across different spectrum bands with the ability to support over 1 Million devices per Sq-km.

Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC)

The URLLC will take human-to-machine interaction to the next level offering sub-millisecond latency and ultra-reliable (i.e. 1 in a million) communications networks supporing the delivery of critical communications—playing role in the technology ecosystem supporting autonomous vehicles, smart grids, remote patient monitoring and telehealth, industrial automation.

5G Opportunities for South Asia

The 5G opportunities can be divided into 3 broader segments – Consumer, Business and Government.

Consumer:

Super-fast, yet affordable 5G networks shall bring new services and experiences to the 1.891 billion or about one fourth of the world’s population. The first wave of 5G deployments are envisaged to be primarily based on eMBB use-cases and shall provide unlimited mobile and home broadband experience for the consumers – far better than today’s 4G and WiFi connectivity. Through ultra-high speed and low-latency connections, consumers will be able to avail a broad-range of data-hungry services, such as HD streaming and gaming services, seamless video conferencing and sharing, as well as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) services. All these services are expected to be availed keeping the same monthly budget, thanks to at least 10 times cost reduction from 4G to 5G based data services.

Business:

The eMBB services will also help the fledgling SME and Corporate businesses of the countries to migrate to Cloud supporting various cloud-based software, unified communication and conferencing needs. Using the mMTC, the companies in the RMG, Pharmaceuticals and FMCG sectors will be able to deploy various assembly line and supply chain automation techniques, which will significantly increase their efficiency. On the other hand, applications like asset tracking, logistics & workers’ safety will help the businesses to improve their productivity.

Government:

Perhaps, the most transformative impacts of 5G will be in the government sector for South Asia. 5G powered Smart Cities can implement use-cases like smart parking, smart waste-management, smart street-lights, smart public safety, etc and enable smart decision making and planning to optimize the quality of life for citizens and increase productivity.

5G can accelerate implementation of Smart Grid/Utilities in South Asia  to a great extent, enabling use-cases like smart metering, service quality monitoring, fault localization, automation and control, infrastructure management and demand management. The utilities can utilize these services to better manage between demand & supply, improve service quality & reliability, and ensure precision billing and revenue collection. On the other hand, customers can monitor and manage their consumption in near real-time and pay bills and get notified about alerts and outages through their smart phones.

Apart from the above, 5G can help government implement digitization and automation projects across several sectors like health, education and agriculture.

Key Challenges for 5G deployment in South Asia:

Despite many potential benefits, there are significant challenges exist to implement 5G and get the most out of it. Operators are skeptical about the business case given the high-levels of investment needed to deploy 5G networks, as well as its dependencies on device and apps ecosystem readiness. In such a scenario, actions from the policy-makers will make a great difference in facilitating a robust 5G investment case.

Some of these key challenges are outlined below:

Spectrum: The key features of 5G, i.e. speed, reliability and capacity mainly come from more and new bands of spectrum. Price and allocation modality of spectrum will play a major in the business cases of the 5G operators. With the current level of spectrum price, operators will hardly see any business case for immediate adoption of 5G in South Asia . Moreover, lots of clean-ups and harmonization are required in the 700 MHz, 3.5 GHz and 26-28 GHz bands to make them available for 5G deployment. Affordable access to these spectrum and a clear road map of their availability are the keys to encourage investments in 5G.

Infrastructure: Along with spectrum, easy and affordable access to infrastructure (poles and towers, antenna, fiber network) is also critically important to ensure 5G capacity and coverage. Hence, attention needs to be paid to reform some of the guidelines and arrangements related to authority policies, so that all players can offer their complementary assets and capabilities under a harmonized 5G infrastructure sharing guideline .

Policy: Unlike 2G/3G/4G, the use-case driven 5G technology require close engagements with devices and application developer communities, government agencies and telecom industry. Taxation regime for IoT sensors/devices and connectivity (e.g. SIM TAX, VAT/SD/SC) needs to be reformed to encourage proliferation of IoT applications. Cross-Industry collaboration is required to expedite national ICT projects, such as Smart City/Grid/Education/Health to prepare ground for 5G-based digitalization and automation projects. Also, right and pragmatic policies based on international best practices needs to be put in place for Cloud and Data Centers to cater for the ‘Data Tsunami’ that 5G will fuel.

Security: As 5G networks are expected to become the backbone of many critical national IT applications, such as Smart City, Smart Grids, Healthcare, etc. the integrity and availability of those networks will become major concerns and challenges from national security perspective. Due to its dependencies on devices and applications, risks related to major security flaws may significantly increase. For example, threats deriving from poor firmware and software development processes which make it easier for the hackers to maliciously insert back-doors into products and make them harder to detect. Hence, necessary security and data privacy policies and best practices needs to be in place, such as data encryption, device/software certification, network slicing, etc.

Conclusion

5G is expected to play a key role in an emerging economy of South Asia , improving economic growth, enhancing citizen experiences and creating new business opportunities. The implementation of 5G in South Asia  would be quite different than the rest of the world as, the most populous and the most densely populated geographical region , is leap-frogging from a completely analog to a digital economy bypassing the intermediary steps.

However, significant skepticism exists regarding the investment case of 5G, which needs to be addressed by carefully crafted spectrum, infrastructure, taxation and cloud hosting policies. This can reduce business uncertainties and create an encouraging investment environment for all 5G players, including operators, infrastructure providers, device vendors, developer community, and most importantly, government and business customers.

Author Profile

Amram David
Amram David
Amram is a technical analyst and partner at DFI Club Research, a high-tech research and advisory firm .He has over 10 years of technical and business experience with leading high-tech companies including Huawei,Nokia,Ericsson on ICT, Semiconductor, Microelectronics Systems and embedded systems.Amram focuses on the business critical points where new technologies drive innovations.
Latest entries
  • best gaming pcAMD2022.02.22Best PreBuilt Gaming PC For Money
  • ampere_nvidia_rtx_3000AMD2022.02.01Nvidia Ampere: New GPU Generation Unveiled 2022
  • 5G2021.01.10What is The Difference between 5G and 6G?
  • online food deliveryTech Business2020.06.1610 Advantages That Apps Have Over Websites For Your Business

Trending

best gaming pc

Best PreBuilt Gaming PC For Money

ampere_nvidia_rtx_3000

Nvidia Ampere: New GPU Generation Unveiled 2022

What is The Difference between 5G and 6G?

online food delivery

10 Advantages That Apps Have Over Websites For Your Business

AI robot

Is The World Better Without AI (Artificial Intelligence)?

Pinchtype-Facebook-Reality-Labs 2020

Facebook Shows The Strangest Keyboard You Have Ever Seen

AI and Corona

AI in the First Line Of Defense Against Corona

AI in medicine 2020

What AI Means For Medicine

AI 2020

Always Question AI Systems

Top Subreddits

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Home
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Disclaimer
  • Top Subreddits
  • About

Copyright © 2023 | DFIClub | DFICLUB:ORG IS A PARTICIPANT IN THE AMAZON SERVICES LLC ASSOCIATES PROGRAM, AN AFFILIATE ADVERTISING PROGRAM DESIGNED TO PROVIDE A MEANS FOR SITES TO EARN ADVERTISING FEES BY ADVERTISING AND LINKING TO AMAZON.COM. AMAZON, THE AMAZON LOGO, AMAZONSUPPLY, AND THE AMAZONSUPPLY LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF AMAZON.COM, INC. OR ITS AFFILIATES. AS AN AMAZON ASSOCIATE WE EARN AFFILIATE COMMISSIONS FROM QUALIFYING PURCHASES.