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By Sandeep Bhambure and Rick Vanove

The advent of 5G will be important to realize Indias digital ambition. At the first glance, 5G promises to unleash new capabilities with billions of connected IoT devices that will lay foundation for smarter cities, industrial automation, and transform key services across sectors to shape quality of citizens life.

According to Deloitte, Indias digital economy has the potential to reach $1 trillion by the year 2025. This highlights that 5G can be the potential enabler for technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR) etc. to fuel growth in key industries.

How 5G improves IoT projects

The main benefits of 5G will be enhanced bandwidth and reduced latency for devices defined from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). For IoT uses, this will introduce options for many critical applications.

One emerging area for IoT will be effectively gathering real-time information. 3GPP has two types of technologies that will help IoT scale: enhanced Machine-Type Communication (eMTC) and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). These both focus on reducing complexity, having better device density and establishing more power efficiency. eMTC is associated with real-time items, such as wearables and personal IoT use cases. While NB-IoT focuses on solutions where latency is more tolerable and a lower amount of data needs to be transferred. Additionally, some of these solutions can have more than 10 years of battery life. Couple the mobility with a battery like this and organizations can overcome some of the barriers to implementing an IoT solution.

To put some perspectives on a number of changes in place here, both eMTC and NB-IoT implementations will benefit. Qualcomm is very interested in the milestone that 5G brings, and has produced a visual roadmap of what 5G will enable with 3GPP capabilities. All the benefits like better positioning, enhanced battery life, real-time uses, and serious scale coupled with the improved performance will go beyond what IT pros expected just a few years ago.

IoT faces potential challenges with 5G

As mentioned above, there are some considerations to pay attention to. When businesses make these types of changes and introduce this type of scale, the backend solution should be ready to support it. The amount of data, data transfer and the number of devices connected will introduce some concerns that need to be taken into account.

The only practical way to build IoT solutions on serious scale based on 5G is through the hyperscale public clouds in many situations. Of course, a strong recommendation like that requires answering detailed questions around the specific use case. The reality is that thousands of IoT devices which provide real-time data or rich media could potentially saturate communication lines and storage resources of a traditional data center quite rapidly. The hyperscale public clouds will provide the scalability to match this significant change coming for IoT solutions.

5G is a big deal, and its more than just what people will keep in their pocket. Because of that, organization need to consider the business impact of a 5G solution. Will the IoT solution powered by 5G provide an overall benefit? Will the IoT solution powered by 5G uncover bottlenecks or introduce capacity constraints to existing services, platforms and resources?

The practical advice is to ensure that cloud is a part of the IoT solution organisations choose, and is powered by 5G from the start. This will help organizations avoid complicated problems later that can put the whole IoT solution value at risk.

There's no doubt that 5G will empower the next wave of industry growth in India. What organizations truly require is to prepare their IT infrastructure and data management strategy for addressing the massive amount of data generated from the IoT devices. The integrated power of IoT, cloud and 5G technology will spur innovation to positively impact human lives and economic growth.

The authors are Vice President and Managing Director, India & SAARC, Veeam Software and Senior Director Product Strategy, Veeam Software.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETCIO.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETCIO.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly.

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