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Journalism of Courage
India will present to a global standards agency its own version of 5G technology that is adapted for its villages, said the National Cyber Security Coordinator in the Prime Minister’s Office, Rajesh Pant.
“What we are saying for those standards is that in the rural areas we want high-speed. We don’t want that latency, so we want larger cells in our rural areas,” Pant said on Tuesday at the Observer Research Foundation’s (ORF) CyFy conference. Small cells refers to the significantly smaller coverage area of each cell tower that is a well known feature of 5G’s infrastructure.
“Why I am saying larger cells is because in 5G, the cell size is going to become about 100 meters since the frequencies are higher. So we are saying that in the villages, you have an Indian version, you have a larger cell size of say, three to five kilometers. Only then will some income come from 5G in India,” he said.
India is making its standards called “5G India version” for the next International Telecommunications Union (ITU) meeting to be conducted in December, Pant said. He told The Indian Express on the conference’s sidelines that the agency heading the initiative is at IIT Madras and will be routed through the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).
IIT Madras Professor V Kamakoti is a part of the National Security Advisory Board and has collaborated with the PMO on 5G development. He was also roped in by the Delhi High Court to submit a report on WhatsApp traceability. Pant was discussing the need for coordinated patents and standards so that India “doesn’t miss the bus” of this next revolution. The monetary value of technology will only come with patents and standards, Pant said.
Pant said that global discussions such as the Bhudapest Convention on Cybercrime or the Tallinn Manuel on cyber conflict have divisive fault lines and “Geo-Tech wars” with Russia and China on one side and US and Europe on the other. The way to solve this is to for India to form strategic alliances so no one company, like Huawei, dominates 5G, he said.
