A GAME OF snakes & Ladders

A 5G perspective on opportunities and hurdles for SaaS in India

- Abhishek Malhotra

India has welcomed the incidence of 5G in a favorable manner. This is not just because of the benefits that come with high-speed internet services, but also because the government has been taking initiatives both from a policy as well as a budget point of view.

The proliferation of tech services like video and voice-based communication tools, and mission-critical services like digital healthcare, require low latency and high bandwidth infrastructural support that 5G offers for their underlying enablement.

The 5G network's future rests on software-defined networking (SDN), whose central concept is to decouple the infrastructure of wireless networks from expensive, closed hardware and shift it to an intelligent software layer running on inexpensive commodity hardware. So, this could be the next major venture for IT firms to walk into after the proliferation of the cloud computing space, which is still reaping benefits.

With the growing ubiquity and acceptance of IoT (Internet of Things), basing them on 5G will create a broader opportunity for companies in their service offerings and portfolios. Simply put, it will allow the companies to reimagine products and services, and develop new capabilities within their existing setups.