Latest news with #ETTelecom5GCongress2025
Time of India
01-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Fiber has stronghold in backhaul connectivity: Industry
NEW DELHI: Fiber has a stronghold in underpinning India's telecom infrastructure in the backhaul, despite the emergence of new technologies, according to executives of the country's top telecom carriers. 'More fiber will ensure coverage of newer areas on fiber. Besides fiber, there are technologies like microwave and E-band, which have more scalability and capability, but also have limitations. So these technologies have to complement fiber,' said Deepak Sanghi, executive vice president, head (IP & transport network), Bharti Airtel , at the eighth edition of the ETTelecom 5G Congress 2025, which concluded on March 24. Sanghi said cost engineering and optimisations are equally necessary before implementing a new network connectivity technology, particularly in a cost-sensitive market like India. 'Any technology is good to implement unless and until we work on the cost aspect. There have to be significant changes from this perspective so that we stay continuously on the path to lower cost per bit,' he added. Girish Dave, head (5G, 6G & AI solution management), Jio, in turn, said that fiber continues to be the 'gold standard' for physical connectivity, especially for last-mile access in urban regions. 'But in the dense urban areas where it is not feasible to put a fiber, we use outdoor CPEs (consumer premises equipment) to connect to the radio base station. Using this arrangement, we are comfortably achieving up to 1 Gbps speeds with C-band spectrum. So this is the level of innovation happening in the industry,' Dave added. Jophy Varghese, APAC head (system integration) & country manager (India), Verizon Business , noted that telcos face several challenges in upgrading their backhaul networks, ranging from cost, interoperability, vendor lock-in, regulatory compliance, and security. 'So I think the companies are investing heavily to ensure that while they are undergoing this mega shift, the customer experience does not get impacted,' Varghese added. 'I think the hyperscalers and the overall ecosystems are coming together to ensure that we are gearing up for the future. We would see more partnerships being forged in this space as we move forward.' Pashupati Singh, director (account management), Ciena , said that the industry is increasingly making backhaul networks robust to cater to the demands for a nearly 100% uptime and ultra-low-latency bandwidth. 'Here, AI and machine learning (ML) play a very important role for any network. With AI and ML of late, globally we have been able to develop algorithms that help us understand and proactively predict events in real-time to prevent outages and service disruptions,' Singh said. 'With the help of these, we will help everyone to reduce the cost per bit and improve uptime.' 'O&M (operations & maintenance) plays a vital role in any network. The guaranteed uptime and the quality of fiber also play vital roles. Improvement of the fiber quality is the most important factor for any fiber backbone, or you will have a jittery experience,' said Sandeep Donde, founder & CEO, Microscan Infocomm . Donde suggested that the telecom industry may consider consolidating its fiber infrastructure footprint to attain synergies, resiliency, and quality of services. 'Fiber plays a major role in backhaul to an ordinary person, such as for connecting a tower to the core network or a customer premises to the internet. The deeper the fiber, the less the load on backhaul. Backhaul needs to be very strong, especially for companies like us specialising in content delivery,' said Anil Malhotra, chief revenue officer (affiliate sales) and head (public & regulatory affairs), Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited. Akanksha Saxena, director, KPMG India, moderated the panel discussion.
Time of India
29-04-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Cost emerges as major impediment to mass market adoption of 5G RedCap IoT: Telcos
NEW DELHI: Cost has emerged as the major impediment to the mass market adoption of fifth-generation ( 5G )-driven Reduced Capability (RedCap) Internet of Things (IoT) technology, according to India's top telecom operators Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio . The telco executives, however, believe that the availability of affordable devices in large economies such as China and India will propel the uptake of the technology. 'RedCap is essentially a software update. But that also involves a cost. So I feel the deployment will completely depend on whether the cost of the devices comes down to the level for use cases to become commercially viable,' Siddharth Talawadekar, vice president & business head (IoT), Airtel Business, said during a panel discussion at the ETTelecom 5G Congress 2025. 'That scale-up will happen when the large-scale use cases come in markets like China and India,' Talawadekar said. 'So it is a bit of a chicken and egg story currently.' Notably, the Sunil Mittal-driven telco, along with Swedish Ericsson and Qualcomm Technologies, had in 2023, demonstrated a pre-commercial RedCap technology on its 5G network. RedCap is an evolution of 5G technology to cater to use cases that are not yet served by the new radio (NR) specifications. Compared to LTE, RedCap offers similar data rates with improved latency, energy and spectrum efficiency, making it suitable for applications like 4K video surveillance, wearables (AR/VR/MR headsets), inventory management, and Industry 4.0 enabled by private 5G. 'So today, cost is one angle that is prohibiting the proliferation of this use case. However, RedCap is perfectly fit for industrial automation, dark factories (which operate without people), and video surveillance, among others,' said Mohan Raju, vice president & vertical head (IoT), Reliance Jio. 'Probably industrial demand will drive RedCap IoT, but the consumer segment not as much. I think the industrial requirements, the business dynamics, and the economics have to make sense for it to be practical,' Gulshan Khurana, executive vice president (EVP) at Vodafone Idea (Vi) said, echoing similar views as his peers. Julian Gorman, head of Asia Pacific (APAC) at GSMA , in turn, said that 5G standalone (SA) architecture will be crucial to enabling the RedCap IoT ecosystem. 'Moving the whole ecosystem along requires the industry to move to that standalone architecture, and that will be a big wave to push things through,' Gorman said. He added that RedCap IoT is still in the development stage, and has not attained commercial maturity yet. 'We expect that in the next two to three years, the financial attractiveness of RedCap modules will take over, with the attractiveness of Cat and NB-IoT modules fading away. RedCap IoT will start to catch up as the more dominant technology in the next decade,' Gorman said. Jio's Raju said that despite the challenges, there could be a huge volume of devices which may enable the industry to optimally monetise the RedCap IoT technology. 'The number of devices on RedCap would be far higher than any other modules because they would be used by ordinary people. So a 7 billion population may use nearly 14 billion devices, and this figure could be higher in the next 10 years. This volume can be monetised in a very optimal way,' Raju added. 'At Counterpoint Research , we forecast that by 2030, almost 17% of the IoT module shipments will be on RedCap. Including the eRedCap, 25% of the module shipments will happen on these two technologies. In India, we are likely to see around 10 million shipments by 2030,' said Mohit Agrawal, research director (AI & IoT), Counterpoint Research, who moderated this panel discussion. 'In summary, RedCap would be an important technology,' Agrawal added.
Time of India
21-04-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Partnership with tech firms to create locally-relevant, monetisable AI use cases: Indian telcos
NEW DELHI: Top executives of Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio said partnerships between telecom carriers and technology firms and startups will become increasingly crucial to develop locally-relevant and monetisable artificial intelligence (AI) use cases and models. 'Telcos traditionally have had a strong ICT network, and the partners have a strong platform. I see both of them working together to pick up use cases that can be monetised, which can increase our efficacy. I would expect a partnership that can build India-specific models, which can better help our customers,' said Rashim Kapoor, executive vide president (core networks) and hub CTO, Airtel. He spoke during a panel discussion at the eighth edition of the ETTelecom 5G Congress 2025 . Kapoor said Airtel has worked extensively to build in-house AI algorithms which are supporting a wide range of functions, including energy-saving in network operations and network testing. Similarly, he added that Airtel has built a strong AI-driven spam and scam control engine, and significant work has been done internally on go-to-market (GTM) strategy and on handling customer queries by call centres using this technology. Kapil Ahuja, CEO (North), Jio, in turn, said the telecom company is experienced in operating and running networks, and is now building out AI infrastructure, including data centers, for enabling cost-effective operations. 'We are looking at how to bring the cost levels to a significantly lower level to drive its adoption. There are things we do, including through partnerships. Our overall strategy is moving toward AI-based networks and utilising the technology internally for our processes, and ensuring we enable all the enterprise customers as well,' Ahuja said. 'We believe we are strongly positioned to make AI affordable and take it to the next level in the country,' he added. Jio has built its own AI platform, called 'JioBrain', which powers various in-house applications and ensures its employees are skilled to use the latest AI tools. Airtel's partnership with Google is aimed at unique technology and telco AI solutions such as those in geospatial mapping with location intelligence, voice analytics trained across languages and marketing with high-precision ads targeting. Meanwhile, Jio Platforms (JPL), the telecom and digital services arm of Reliance Industries, is co-developing AI language models in partnership with Nvidia to build use cases in areas such as retail, healthcare, agriculture and education. Separately, the Central government last year approved the national IndiaAI Mission with a financial outlay of ₹10,371.92-crore last year to catalyse the AI ecosystem in India. The initiative focuses on establishing computing capacity, datasets platform, skilling, and startup financing, among others. Radhika Gupta, head of data acquisition, senior director, GSMA Intelligence, highlighted that general-purpose AI models such as OpenAI's GPT-4o perform below average vis-a-vis certain 3GPP specifications-compliant models for telecom-specific queries, indicating that the telecom industry needs to have a common set of practices and framework to fine-tune AI large language model (LLM) models for use cases and applications. 'Indian telcos should bring their use cases, AI queries, AI models, and test them against the GSMA Open-Telco LLM benchmark to see the accuracy of results before making a move to deploy it for either customer operations, marketing, or network optimisation,' Gupta said. Anil Kumar Bhardwaj, DDG, Department of Telecommunications (DoT), said a focus group comprising GenAI companies – AMD, Meta, Microsoft, and Accenture – are working on recommendations for India, which will help create a policy framework for using AI and GenAI in telecom networks. 'The DoT and TRAI are also working on the quality of experience norm, compared to the quality of service norms earlier. We are now looking at real-time metadata for 5G networks. So all that change in regulation is being contemplated with the use of AI,' Bhardwaj added. Ludvig Landgren, vice president (cloud software & services) and head (enterprise), Market Area South East Asia, Oceania and India, Ericsson , said while AI is not revolutionising telecom operations yet, the technology has a significant revenue generation potential in the future. 'It's not revolutionising operations yet, but it absolutely has the potential. Instead of conducting drive tests in India, AI can provide all the information. But maybe more attractive is the revenue side. The data is already there in the network, so the AI chatbot can take its life on its own and create billing and service offerings, and promote them. This is revenue creation,' Landgren said. Sonica Bajaj, partner, KPMG in India , said AI and 5G have a symbiotic relationship. 'While we are seeing telcos use AI to promote 5G operations and make the networks more efficient, we also see an essential component of how AI is being deployed, and to leverage the benefits of AI, 5G is a must,' she said. Bajaj moderated the panel discussion.
