An uphill task ahead for telecom service providers

The 5G network architecture needs to support up to ten times the capacity of the current 4G infrastructure, requiring a massive spike in Capex

- RAJESH KAUSHAL

With major telecom players gearing up for the launch of the 5G network, the industry needs a lot of investments for network densification and active and physical infrastructure. Even though 5G has been launched in several cities across India, its complete roll-out demands an extensive undertaking.

A quick look at the data on global 5G infrastructure and one can note that China's 1.5 billion subscribers are served by two million towers as compared to 7,00,000 towers in India. Of these, only 30% of towers in India are fibreised, compared to 70-80% in China, Japan, Korea, and the USA. These data points indicate that India needs 2X-3X more infrastructure to meet the increasing demands for data and deliver better Quality of Service (QoS) to users. For network densification closer to the point of data consumption, numerous cell sites, thousands of small cells, and IBS solutions would be necessary. Large-capacity new datacentres must be constructed to compute many Exabytes. This opens up several greenfield possibilities for the entire infrastructure ecosystem.