India’s homegrown and controversial 5G standard, 5Gi, has divided the country’s operators as well as the wider cellular industry since its emergence as a candidate alternative during 2020. The debate has intensified and appears to be coming to a crisis point as the two biggest Indian telcos, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, line up on opposite sides.
This has led the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to direct the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), to come up with a clear indication of implications implementing 5Gi, outlining pros and cons. This includes assessing how acceptable the Indian standard will be for both telcos and their infrastructure providers. This it hopes will help it come to a decision over whether India should proceed with deployment of 5Gi, perhaps in parallel with the conventional 3GPP version.
Matters have been brought to a head largely because the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has given the go-ahead for 5G trials from this month, allowing Jio, Airtel and Vodafone Idea to partner approved vendors of equipment to develop use cases relevant for India. The biggest story was that Chinese vendors were excluded but clearly the operators also needed guidance over whether to feature 5Gi.
The roots of 5Gi go back further than last year, and certainly to 2016 when India was lobbying the ITU to accept a test use case called Low-Mobility-Large-Cell (LMLC) that was better suited to its terrain and demography than other options. The ITU bowed to this pressure in 2017 by adopting this standard, which specifies a transmit waveform to increase range, developed by Indian research institutions including IIT Hyderabad, CEWiT and IIT Madras, as well as some local telecoms technology companies. This work has expanded and now culminated in 5Gi, potentially an Indian version of 5G.
The ITU has remained broadly supportive through the intervening period, and after a three-year evaluation accepted 5Gi as a global 5G standard in December 2020. Ironically, this endorsement prompted many players in the field to object, largely on the grounds this would duplicate development efforts and impede further deployment of 5G in India.
It certainly met strong opposition from key vendors, including Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, and NEC, as well as Huawei. Their line was that it would impose unnecessary costs and duplication of effort on them, unless 5Gi was made fully compatible with 3GPP 5G standards, or at least be optional so that operators could avoid it and take advantage of components that were already available at a more competitive price.
This indicates that the investigation by COAI might conclude 5Gi is not favored by major vendors, although in practice this would not be a decisive factor. The Indian market is so large that the vendors would support 5Gi in their products if push came to shove – as happened when China implemented its own flavor of 3G, TD-SCDMA, which was imposed on the largest MNO, China Mobile.
At first it seems the telcos were also almost unanimous in their opposition to 5Gi. India’s top three MNOs – Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea – all initially rejected the idea of it becoming a mandatory 5G standard. But while Airtel especially was opposed to 5Gi outright, on the grounds that it would increase costs of both network and devices, while impacting seriously interoperability between networks based on the two standards, Jio came across to support it in principle. Jio still argued that it should not compromise quality or increase costs, but that otherwise an indigenous technology that would help the cause of the ‘Make in India’ campaign should be welcomed.
This developing stand-off led to TRAI’s intervention and its call on COAI to establish an agreed position among operators. Signals so far are that COAI is veering towards Airtel’s position that adopting an alternative 5G would be counterproductive. COAI’s director general SP Kochhar recently argued that 5Gi offered no proven performance gains over 3GPP’s standards and insisted that local standards should be discretionary.
It is worth glimpsing how 5Gi does differ and what motivated its development. Its essence is a transmit waveform for Massive MIMO optimized for greater range at higher millimeter wave frequencies. The aim was to maximize signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) so that the increased capacity enabled by MIMO did not inhibit signal range too much. Opponents of 5Gi contend that this is merely duplicating what 3GPP has been doing, given that range is an issue for mmWave everywhere and not just in India. Advocates retort that 5Gi does this better, and the truth is hard to assess at this stage.
All that can be said with near certainty, given the ITU’s endorsement, is that 5Gi is technically well-founded and would indeed provide a sound basis for 5G roll-out in India. The question is over compatibility and duplication of effort.
Many vendors and operators opposing 5Gi argue that the benefits can be obtained by encouraging open standards to stimulate the innovation that would enable the required range within the canopy of 5G as being implemented elsewhere.
This was NEC’s stated position when the company announced in December 2020 that it had chosen India as the site for its Open RAN laboratory to complement its Center of Excellence (CoE) in the UK. NEC said the new facility would accelerate development of its 5G open ecosystem by pre-integrating partner ORAN components to create readymade end-to-end commercial platforms that could then be tailored to individual operators, including, as it happened, Jio.
Then in February 2021, Airtel revealed it had been stepping up its efforts on the Open RAN front, collaborating with Qualcomm over the latter’s RAN platform, with special focus on deploying 5G-based fixed wireless access (FWA) in a country where traditional fixed broadband coverage is patchy, particularly outside major urban areas.
It could, then, be around O-RAN that India’s finds an agreed way forward for 5G.