India Will Bring Scale To 5G: Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon

According to semiconductor manufacturing major Qualcomm’s CEO Cristiano Amon, India will bring scale to 5G and that will benefit other markets as well.

Speaking with NDTV, Amon said, “I think India has an incredible role to play, not only within India but also globally. I would simply say that India will bring scale to 5G.”

At a round table discussion at a company event in Bengaluru, Amon added, “In India scale may be a catalytic event to allow the proliferation of 5G, including in other developing economies such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, Middle East.”

Amon said that India adopted 4G and digital services such as payments at a very high pace and 5G will take that to the next level. He said that 5G will build a ‘gigabit society’ in the country.

“I expect that it is not only going to create an incredible development of the mobile internet in India but now, we’ll enable that technology at scale to proliferate globally,” Qualcomm CEO added.

Speaking about the use cases of 5G in India, Amon said that 5G would connect not only phones but also cars, computers and industry 4.0 applications.

“The opportunities are very fast and I think we are at the beginning of something big,” Amon added.

The San Diego-based chipmaker supplies semiconductor components that are included in the telecom infrastructure across the network. In this segment, Qualcomm competes with Intel.

The semiconductor manufacturer also supplies 5G radio access network (RAN) technology to telcos, along with Open RAN technologies that allow telcos to use components from different manufacturers.

Last year, Airtel and Qualcomm announced a partnership to deploy 5G in India, with the chipmaker supplying the telco with 5G RAN and Open RAN infrastructure. In 2020, Qualcomm also announced a partnership with Jio for 5G development in India.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched 5G services in India on October 1, at the sixth edition of the India Mobile Congress. At the IMC 2022, Indian telcos also announced their plans for the 5G rollout.

The 5G Rollout Grand Prix

Bharti Airtel launched 5G on the same day, taking pole in the race to achieve 5G ubiquity. Reliance Jio is launching 5G services today (October 5), while Vodafone Idea still does not have timelines for a rollout. In terms of spectrum bought, Jio bought almost twice as much 5G spectrum as Airtel and multiple times more spectrum than Vi.

There’s a catch, however. Airtel and Vi, for what it’s worth, have a decided advantage in the race – consumers won’t have to change SIMs to switch to 5G. This would give them an early-mover advantage as well as allow both the telcos to quickly achieve scale on their 5G networks.

However, both Airtel and Vi are set to launch 5G NSA (non-standalone), which is a form of 5G that has a legacy 4G LTE core. While 5G NSA consists of both 4G and 5G base stations (from where the network is distributed to users), 4G base stations take precedence. In short, 5G NSA is not capable of delivering the same capabilities as a pure 5G, the 5G SA (standalone).

On the other hand, Jio has delayed its launch slightly to go for 5G SA. The network uses both the cloud-native 5G core and the 4G LTE core and distributes networks over 5G base stations. Both the cores are separate from each other (hence the name, 5G SA). Therefore, in the long run, Jio might have a slight advantage over the others.

Jio has set a target of December 2023 for the completion of the deployment and Airtel has earmarked March 2024 for the same. In the long run, however, a quarter here and there would not matter; the quality of the networks would.