Is 5G going to be a major upgrade or minor upgrade for Jio and our Users?

[Views expressed here and elsewhere on the Internet are my own and not that of my employer]

In short, Major Upgrade. Let us start with the typical user. 5G standards are still evolving. Having seen the draft standard, it is clear that this is the first wireless network built to accommodate the rapid proliferation of devices expected in wake of IoT and CCTV (Closed Ciruit Television), or more accurately IPTV (Surveillance Cameras connected to the Internet) with more and more things getting smart and wireless.

Act One

Fibre can scale to anytime, anywhere video; 4G wireless cannot.

Given all the 4G advertising and the exchanges in the Great Telecom War of 2017, Indian telecom users are no doubt aware that they currently ride on the fastest networks ever built on Indian soil. It turns out that the wireless link between the radio transmitters on a tower and the mobile handsets it is serving is a major bottleneck and so is the total wireless capacity of the tower itself. Fibre can scale to anytime, anywhere video; 4G wireless cannot. ( I learnt this lesson quickly at Jio when I discussed the use case of Television crew using 4G for direct broadcasting (currently they use VSAT on their Vans). Jio’s (then) President of Enterprise and 4G Ecosystem, Dr. Sumit Chowdhury, explained the bandwidth limitations given that the average number of smartphones served by one tower in Indian cities is so high that congestion is inevitable in video-intensive applications.

4G and previous generations were not built for scenarios where every mobile and wireless CCTV is streaming video. IoT sensors send frequent bursts of data, however current use cases demonstrate that they do not hog bandwidth as much as video does. An example is Netflix — Netflix alone contributes to 10% of the upstream traffic on the Internet in the US. Upstream? Yes, that is counting the acknowledgement packets that are sent back upstream to ensure robust delivery of the video packets downstream. Clearly the best of global wireless networks are not designed for anytime, anywhere video streaming.

Act Two

Enter 5G. Massive MIMO. Beamforming. Millimeter Waves. Small Cells. Full Duplex.

I welcome the user to check out these technologies on Wikipedia or elsewhere on the Internet. You will realize that this is a major upgrade. IPTV alone contributes to 3/4th of the Internet traffic today and this is expected to go higher to 4/5th of the traffic. 4G LTE is unable to handle this.

5G will pave the way for massive machine-type communications, which could support one million devices in a single square kilometer.