Preparing India for a 5G-powered revolution

Authored by Vikas Gupta, Director and General Manager, Global Compute and Networking, Enterprise, India, Dell EMC

Imagine a world where you will be able to download any HD movie within 7-8 seconds, it will be possible to centralize the pattern of vehicular flows as well as traffic snags at a data center that, too, at the heart of the city, and where your doctor will be able to monitor your health staying far from your place. Sooner than later, all these will turn into a hard reality. It’s the world enabled by 5G. 

With 2019 preparing the ground for new-age technologies to drive transformation and usher in a new era of human-machine partnership, we all are eagerly waiting for 5G—the fifth generation cellular technology. 5G networks are believed to have the potentials of cater to new workloads buoyed by an overwhelming growth of IoT and intelligent sensors. And if Ericsson Mobility Report is anything to go by, India will witness more than 10 million 5G subscriptions by 2023, while digitalization will pave the way for a USD 27 billion revenue opportunity for the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) industry in India by 2026. 

A World of Opportunities Driven by 5G 

Our transition to 5G will make room for a more distributed architecture, followed by a steady migration to edge computing. It will lay emphasis on more storage/compute as well as various analytical features—which should stay closer to data sources. Given this, it’s safe to say that 5G unlocks the door for machine learning and artificial intelligence to leverage these massive lakes of content and data. And when we gain the ability to process more data, it will ensure better decision-making backed by more analytics. And all these will ultimately leave a huge impact on business models. 

Digital Transformation Driven by 5G—the India Story 

At present, the wave of digital transformation is fast sweeping across India, thanks to the growing penetration of internet and broadband services, an exponential uptake of data, the government’s emphasis on digitalization, and the rising technology adoption throughout sectors. 

According to some industry predictions, our country is likely to be on course for 5G enablement from 2020 onwards. It will enhance the internet speed and QoS and give a boost to various digital transformation of services, comprising healthcare, automotive, media, and entertainment, education, retail, agriculture, and manufacturing, amongst others. And most importantly, there will be more possibilities to launch low-cost yet high-end 5G mobile handsets and telecom devices in the market. 

From the societal perspective, 5G use cases for a number of initiatives, such as smart cities, hold the promises to enhance the life of common people through significant improvement in different services, comprising utilities, public safety, transport, and so on. Aptly revealed by Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, “5G is not simply an evolution from 4G. 5G empowers massive progress.” 

Turning Possibilities Around 5G into Realities 

At Dell EMC, we strongly believe that this one-of-its-kind transformation of mobility will make stride through 4 key vectors: 

• Digital Transformation – Standing for the monetization of artificial intelligence and data analytics. 

• IT Transformation –Modernizing infrastructure to cater to various automated processes. 

• Workforce Transformation – Offering the skills and tools required for operations to make the most of emerging infrastructure capabilities.

• Security Transformation – Weaving it natively in every service and process. 

So, for technology enthusiasts as well as consumers, the coming years are undoubtedly going to be amazing. Soon, there will be an end to the concept of digitizing the traditional way of doing things. With 5G, we are likely to embrace various models, methods, services, and products for the digital age. 

In this first-approaching 5G world, what role will be played by Dell EMC is summed up by the vision of John Roese, CTO of Dell EMC while addressing at MWC 2019, “We are engaged with almost every global operator in the world as partner to help them develop their 5G infrastructure.” 

In short, at Dell EMC, we are playing a significant role to drive the evolution of the execution environments as well as the implementations of different functions and services around 5G. Our strong position in enterprise systems, coupled with the modifications of our product portfolio (both software and hardware), is providing us with an edge to address various requirements emerging from 5G.