IMC 2018 signals that India is ready for 5G business

The India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2018 will conclude on Friday bringing the first wave of 5G business for Indian telecom operators.
IMC 2018 inaugurationThe largest telecom event in India – organized by COAI — attracted more than 18,000 people on Thursday, the day two of the summit, and 15,000 people on Wednesday, showing the demand for such platforms in India.

The presence of Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal, Vodafone Idea chairman Kumara Mangalam Birla and Reliance Jio chairman Mukesh Ambani on a single platform during the inauguration of IMC 2018 — despite their competition in the Indian telecom market — shows the power of COAI under director general Rajan Mathews and his team.

Airtel and Reliance Jio showcased their 5G use-cases, indicating that India will be ready for 5G in 2020.

Day Two

Global speakers such as Durga Malladi, senior vice president – Engineering at Qualcomm, Sanjay Kaul, president, Asia Pacific and Japan, Service Provider Business at Cisco, Jay Kim, VP at Samsung Electronics, Jay Chen, CEO at Huawei India, Anand Agarwal, group CEO at Sterlite Technologies, Nunzio Mirtillo, senior vice president at Ericsson, Balesh Sharma, CEO of Vodafone India, talked about how 5G would be the key drivers for new technologies and innovations.

Pardeep Kohli, president and CEO of Mavenir, Jim Jefferies, president and CEO of IEEE, Phil Twist, VP, Networks Marketing and Communications at Nokia, Nivruti Rai, country head, Intel India, Jimmy Mizrahi, GM Global Portfolio at ECI Telecom, have attended a panel discussion.

A session called Power of Content focused on how technology is driving data creation and how content delivery is important. Matteo Maga, managing director, CMT, Accenture, Hiren Gada, CEO, Shemaroo Entertainment and Sameer Batra, CEO of Wynk, were the speakers.

IMC 2018 had sessions on pro-innovation regulation and privacy, The Emerging World of Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, E-tail – The need of the Future, HealthTech – Age of Cyborgs, Industry 4.0: Building Factories of the Future, M-Education, Value Creation through Digital Marketing, Future of Enterprise, Aadhaar etc.

Some of the panellists included Sandeep Bhushan, head Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook,  Praveen Chandra, chairman of Interventional Cardiology, Medanta, Gurgaon, Sumili Chatterjee, head Brand at BCCL, Santanu Bhattacharya, chief data scientist at Bharti Airtel, among others.

Huawei

Huawei launched its OpenLab in India to provide ICT infrastructure support for smart city and enterprises digitisation transformation.

Sterlite Tech

Sterlite Tech announced that it will develop and deliver software-enabled programmable solutions using Red Hat’s open, enterprise-grade technologies. The solutions will enable communication service providers, enterprises and citizen networks to realise the potential of web-scale Network Function Virtualisation Infrastructure (NFVI) platform, for their network automation and Software Defined Network (SDN) initiatives.

Sterlite Tech launched FTTx MANTRA, a FTTx-as-a-service solution. This solution allows swift roll-out of Fibre-to-the-Point (FTTx) networks at the scale, latency and agility to suit all future requirements of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, for global communication service providers, data centres and citizen networks.

Sterlite Tech showcased its data network capabilities that make up the FTTx MANTRA along with the world’s slimmest 432F Cable, LEAD360 Execution Approach, Network Virtualisation approach with Digital Commerce and Customer Management platform.

Day One

Speakers include Ajit Pai, chairman, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), David Hammarwall, head of Product Line 5G RAN, Product Area Networks, Ericsson, Vinayak Godse, senior director, Data Security Council of India, Bimal Dayal, CEO of Indus Towers and Jonathan Wood, senior director at Intel.

Reliance Jio, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm participated in 5G trials.

Samsung announced its plan for India’s first large-scale 5G trial in the first quarter of 2019 in pact with the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).

“Samsung will pave the way for 5G to unlock the potential of India together with industry leaders,” Youngky Kim, head of Networks Business at Samsung Electronics, said.

MediaTek announced the launch of the Helio P70 system-on-chip (SoC), with an enhanced AI engine combined with CPU and GPU upgrades for more AI processing. Helio P70 also comes with upgraded imaging and camera support, a gaming performance boost and advanced connectivity features.

Nokia’s manufacturing unit in Chennai has started manufacturing 5G New Radio (NR) based on the 3GPP 5G New Radio Release 15 standard.

Huawei has reiterated its commitment to bringing 5G to India with full range end-to-end technology showcase at IMC 2018.

Huawei conducted 5G use case demos in partnership with Airtel.

Randeep Sekhon, chief technology officer of Bharti Airtel said, “Having conducted India’s first in-lab 5G test with Huawei, we are delighted to extend our partnership to demonstrate cutting edge AR and VR based use cases for 5G.”