Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the 5G telephony services at the sixth India Mobile Congress in Pragati Maidan on Saturday.
According to an official release, 5G will be launched by the Prime Minister in select cities on Saturday and it will progressively cover the entire country over the next couple of years.
The cumulative economic impact of 5G on India is estimated to reach USD 450 billion by 2035.
Capable of supporting ultra-high-speed internet, the fifth generation or 5G service is expected to unleash new economic opportunities and societal benefits, serving as a transformational force for Indian society.
The three major telecom operators of the country will demonstrate one use case each in front of the Prime Minister to show the potential of 5G technology in India.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio will connect a teacher from a school in Mumbai with students in three different locations in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Odisha.
This, according to official sources, will demonstrate how 5G will facilitate education by bringing teachers closer to students, obliviating the physical distance between them. It will demonstrate the power of Augmented Reality (AR) on screen and how that is being used to teach children across the country, remotely, without the need for an AR device.
In the Airtel demo, a girl from Uttar Pradesh will witness a lively and immersive education experience to learn about the solar system with the help of virtual reality and augmented reality. The girl will share her experience of learning with the Prime Minister by appearing on the dias through a hologram.
The Vodafone Idea test case will demonstrate the safety of workers in an under-construction tunnel of Delhi Metro through the creation of a 'digital twin' of the tunnel on the dias. The digital twin will help give safety alerts to workers in real time from a remote location.
Modi will take a live demo from the dias to monitor the work in real time through utilising VR and artificial intelligence.
"Prime Minister, Narendra Modi will launch 5G services in India on October 1, 2022, and also inaugurate the sixth Edition of India Mobile Congress 2022 to be held from October 1-4, at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi," the release added.
The various use cases that will be demonstrated in front of the Prime Minister in the exhibition include precision drone-based farming, high-security routers and AI-based cyber threat detection platforms, automated guided vehicles, smart ambulances, augmented reality/virtual reality /mixed reality in education and skill development, sewage monitoring system, smart-agri programme and health diagnostics, among others.
5G offers speed multiple times faster than 4G, supports lag-free connectivity, and can enable billions of connected devices to share data in real time.
It will help in providing seamless coverage, high data rate, low latency, and highly reliable communications. Also, it will increase energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency and network efficiency.
Unlike existing mobile communication networks, 5G networks will allow tailoring of requirements for each different use cases within the same network.
Besides powering ultra-low latency connections, which allow downloading full-length high-quality video or movie to a mobile device in a matter of seconds (even in crowded areas), 5G can enable solutions such as e-health, connected vehicles, more-immersive augmented reality and metaverse experiences, life-saving use cases, and advanced mobile cloud gaming, among others.
The launch of 5G services in India, the world's second-biggest smartphone market after China, follows years of intense preparation.
India's biggest ever auction of telecom spectrum held recently had received a record Rs 1.5 lakh crore worth of bids, with Mukesh Ambani's Jio cornering nearly half of all the airwaves for Rs 88,078-crore bid.
Telecom tycoon Sunil Bharti Mittal's Bharti Airtel made a successful bid of Rs 43,084 crore, while Vodafone Idea Ltd bought spectrum for Rs 18,799 crore.
Gautam Adani's group, whose entry in the auction was billed by some as another flashpoint in the rivalry with Ambani, paid Rs 212 crore for 400 MHz. Adani group bought spectrum in the 26 GHz band, which is suitable for setting up a private network for end-to-end communication.
The auction aggregated the demand for a robust 5G ecosystem that can cater to its use cases involving IoT (Internet of Things), M2M (Machine-to-Machine communication), AI (Artificial Intelligence), Edge Computing, and robotics.
The Telecom Department amended the Right of Way (RoW) Rules in August this year, wherein the charges for permissions to lay cables and set up towers have been made reasonable and a ceiling has been fixed for rates for installation of 5G small cells and optical fibre cable on street furniture.
The Department of Telecom has set up a 5G testbed with the help of IITs, IISc Bengaluru and SAMEER to develop technology in 2018.
A 5G hackathon was commenced in 2020 to trigger ideation and prototyping of use-cases by startups and has led to spurring innovative products, the official release said.
