Keynote Speech - 5G India 2018

Keynote Address - 5G India 2018

18 May 2018, Leela Mumbai, India

Excellency Manoj Sinha, Minister of Communications
Madam Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary Ministry of Communications
Mr Anupam Shrivastava, Chairman and MD, BSNL
Mr Sebastien Soriano, Chairman ERCEP, France
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen

Good morning. It is a pleasure to be with you and let me thank the organisers again for their kind invitation. The subject of this conference is attracting great interest all over the world.

5G will change things radically. In a new age of technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and the internet of things, 5G will create new opportunities to stimulate social and economic development.

Access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) has become a development indicator and aspiration in itself. Today, broadband networks are as essential as roads, railways, and water and power networks. This has been well recognized by India’s new policy initiatives.

5G will connect not just people but things. The deployment of internet of things technologies is expected to connect an estimated 50 billion devices to the network by the year 2020. Many innovative services will emerge, from automated driving to remote medical surgery and advanced virtual reality. 5G systems will be ultra-reliable, very low-latency, with improved energy efficiency, and enhanced privacy and security.

ITU supports the development of 5G through its standardization activities and its harmonization of spectrum.
ITU has been developing international standards for over 150 years. It started with the telegraph back in 1865, then telephone, radio, television, satellite, mobile and to today’s internet of things, artificial intelligence and 5G.

ITU’s Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) is coordinating the international standardization and identification of spectrum for 5G mobile development. It is currently in the process of selecting the technologies that will be included in 5G specifications. ITU calls these specifications IMT-2020. This process brings together governments, regulators, mobile operators, manufacturers, academia and standardization bodies from all over the world. And it will be finalized by 2020.

In the meantime, the key 5G performance requirements for IMT-2020 have been agreed. 5G trials and pre-commercial activities are taking place in many countries to evaluate the candidate technologies and test the likely spectrum bands.

Next year, the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-19) will lay out and agree the foundations for 5G. There are a number of candidate bands for new spectrum allocations for 5G. These bands need to be agreed internationally to ensure interconnection and interoperability and the resulting economies of scale. And this is why we need the strong and solid support from our Member States and Sector Members. India has recognized spectrum as a key natural resource for public benefit to achieve its socio-economic goals and its participation in the preparatory process and the conference itself in important for India and the success of the conference.

Let me now turn to the work of our Standardization Sector (ITU-T).

It has launched high-priority new work on 5G ultra-high-speed optical networks which will be the backbone of 5G. This is well recognized by India, as evidenced by India’s new “Fibre First Initiative”. Around the world, networks are supporting a huge rise in data traffic, calling for increasing investment in new optical infrastructure. Global demand for optical fibre has already increased roughly 500% in the past decade, with some 500 million kilometres of fibre now produced each year.

What is evident from the ambitious performance targets of 5G systems and the wide variety of envisioned 5G applications is that future networks will need to be agile all-around players able to perform a wide array of specialized functions. The work on networking aspects of 5G has delivered new ITU standards in areas including network management and orchestration, network softwarization and slicing, information-centric networking, and fixed-mobile convergence. A new ITU-T Focus Group has been launched to work on how machine learning will contribute to the efficiency of 5G systems. The group will define the requirements of machine learning as it relates to technology, data formats and network architectures. One of the Focus Group’s priorities is to address the challenges surrounding the availability and quality of the data required to fuel machine learning algorithms.

We have also launched a new project to clarify the environmental requirements of 5G systems. Energy efficiency is central to the 5G vision. This is a topic that is very dear to me as it affects ICTs impact on climate change. Enhanced Mobile Broadband calls for an increase in network energy efficiency at least as great as the traffic capacity increase of 5G relative to 4G. Achieving this target in scenarios such as 5G hotspots will demand an increase in network energy efficiency by a factor as great as 100.

And of course I must mention the importance of responsible management of electromagnetic fields emitted by wireless communications infrastructure, an issue that receives considerable attention in India. In certain 5G application environments, we will see very high densities of communications. As ICT infrastructure expands, ITU will pay particular attention to the area of human exposure to electromagnetic fields. Our standards in this domain will ensure citizens’ safety and help administrations provide clear information to the communities they serve.

These are exciting times but with that come many challenges. Today we still have 3.8 billion people are not using the internet, mostly in rural areas. To connect all citizens and leave no one behind, a central promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, we need to reduce the digital divide today. And that means using existing ecosystems such as 3G and 4G mobile networks to provide universal and affordable access to telecommunications and ICTs. Once the challenges to develop a sustainable 5G system have been overcome, mobile networks can be gradually upgraded to 5G.

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “The future depends on what we do in the present.”

India’s future is digital. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India campaign promises to revolutionize government services and bring connectivity to under-served rural communities. Aadhaar’s success in providing digital identities to more than a billion people is unprecedented. And the vision behind Make in India, combined with world-class engineering talent, makes this country a top investment and manufacturing destination for the telecommunication and ICT sector.

All these initiatives are empowering countless people across this great nation. Mobile broadband networks will present them with more opportunities than ever before.

ITU congratulates India on its efforts to use 5G to expand mobile and broadband connectivity. And we are open look forward to India hosting more ITU global events such as the recent Financial Inclusion Global Initiative. The generous offer of the Indian government to host an ITU South Asia office and innovation centre in Delhi will greatly increase collaboration between India and ITU and be a spring board to helping India and other countries in South Asia be at the forefront of the 5G revolution bringing the benefits of mobile broadband to everyone, everywhere.

Thank you.