5GCongress: Fibre roll-out key focus for telecom sector to grow 5G, says Morgan Stanley report

Fibre roll-out is a key focus for the telecom sector in the near term, especially for the development of 5G in the country, a report by Morgan Stanley based on ET Telecom’s 5G Congress findings said on Monday.

The report while presenting the industry’s views said that 5G is still a few years away even though there are extensive talks going on in the industry about the same. “5G standards are still evolving globally, with the first global commercial launch expected in 2020. Looking at the scale of investment, we expect the 5G ecosytem to have more participants than just the telcos,” the report stated.

Stanley’s report pointed that there are three major spectrum bands being contemplated for a 5G roll-out including sub 3GHz band, C-Band (3GHz-6GHz) and mmWave (24-30 GHz/ 37-44GHz).

Another aspect highlighted by the report was that of fibre-backhaul which is critical to deploy 5G in order to have low latency, low interference and high network capacity, which can transfer data back and forth to the core network. However, only about 25% of the incumbent operator sites are currently fiberized.

Network densification was another area which was discussed during the event, and as noted by the industry experts, site requirement could rise from more than 0.5 million currently to a few million over the next few years in India.

The report cited that Airtel and Jio have indicated that they will deploy significant MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) and are working towards Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-defined Networking (SDN), thus getting the network 5G ready.

Device ecosystem is another area where industry experts indicated that 5G chip sets could be available by mid-2019, with the initial device ecosystem available by end-2019. However, commercial availability is only expected by 2020.

ET Telecom’s 5G Congress witnessed speakers and attendees from all areas of telecom industry including telcos, gear makers, policy makers, aggregators and device makers.