India and the connected world 2025

5G is expected to unleash unprecedented socio-economic transformation in the next five years. A crystal ball gazing by industry experts at V&D Webinar

- AANCHAL GHATAK

As part of its three-series TLF Dialogue, to celebrate 25 years of mobile telephony in India, Voice&Data recently hosted a webinar on India and connected world 2025. The webinar focused on the long-term future goals as well as how the telecom sector, particularly the emerging new 5G technology, will drive social and economic transformation and help India become Aatmanirbhar.

The participants included Reliance Jio President and Group CTO Shyam Mardikar, COAI Director General Lt. Gen. Dr. SP Kochhar, RailTel Enterprise Business Executive Director Manohar Raja, Ciena Field Systems Engineering Senior Director Gautam Billa, and STL Chief Marketing Officer Manish Sinha, The session was moderated by CyberMedia Group Chairman Pradeep Gupta.

The three big changes

Delivering the keynote address Mardikar said that the one thing that we have learnt in the past six months is the relevance of the physical space. There is the relevance of physical space for work purposes. Now, that is reducing. Globally, there is no relevance of the physical space. So, at least 70% of the employees are not at work. They are remote working. People and things are always connected. We are very close to achieving that, for connectivity.

What happens after that? Beyond connectivity, there are three things coming together. There is hyper compute, hyper storage, and hyper connectivity. If you bring all these together, this whole concept of programmability and distributed computing are garnering big traction. Almost every work will now be stitched to an end-to-end digital fabric. The digital fabric will be stitched across Japan, Australia, Canada, etc., across geographies. It will be one single fabric. Regionalization of work and workforce will be part of one big digital fabric.