‘There’s More Reality With 5G For Enterprises And Governments’: Keysight Technologies CEO

The momentous launch of 5G services by PM Modi in the presence of telecom and technology royalties at the India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2022 event has been in the spotlight since late last week and early this week. While the launch paves the way for higher internet speeds for consumers across India over the next year or so, it also brings to the fore newer use cases that were beyond the reach of 4G. And a great deal of these use cases will be for enterprises.

Against the backdrop of IMC, BW Businessworld’s Rohit Chintapali spoke to Keysight Technologies’ President and CEO Satish Dhanasekaran, who was one of the keynote speakers at the event. During the conversation, the visiting CEO drew a parallel between the 5G launch in the US versus the expected rollout in India and discussed how enterprises stand to gain from 5G.

Could you draw a parallel between how the 5G rollout has been in the US versus how the rollout has started out for India?

While Korea and Japan have started their early waves of deployments, the big scale deployment obviously was the commitment China has made to deploy 5G on a national level. This is then followed by the United States, which had the technology edge but continued to be a bit slower on the deployment scale. This was in large parts due to COVID-19 and the dynamics that played out, which made it really hard to hire people, scale and deploy. But emerging out of the pandemic, US operators now have very strong rollout plans in the region as well. In the last six months, we've started to get 5G coverage on the C-Band deployments in California. 

The big difference is the scale. When you have a billion plus people in a region and with the operators having a strong top-down commitment from the government, I think the level of coordination we are seeing in India will allow for a big rapid ramp up. What's equally impressive to me is the focus demonstrated around the use cases at the Indian Mobile Congress 2022. 

When you compare and contrast, I think there are some very unique India-specific use cases that the Prime Minister did a great job of highlighting at the IMC. 

BW Businessworld recently did an ‘explainer’ on how 5G might be more about enterprise use cases than consumers. Do you think 5G is more about enterprise use cases rather than blazing internet speed that consumers are bound to relish?

5G allows operators to undertake network slicing to really segment the computation and connectivity power of the network and assign resources to different requirements. Many governments of the world are starting to think about how 5G with these capabilities can enable more security/defence use cases to avoid having different communication standards. With 5G, you can use a commercial standard that gives you the scale of the ecosystem, at lower cost per bit and lower cost for devices and networks. Additionally, the technology can also allow customising of the stack. This allows you to put on top of it a layer of applications which gives you the power and scale. And also, it allows you to customise it to your individual application. That’s the true promise of 5G. 

There is more reality with 5G for enterprises and governments than it has been the case with 4G. Because 4G was largely a consumer-oriented technology rollout. 5G builds upon that. Therefore, the amount of use cases that will emerge after you deploy is expected to only increase with time. We are starting to see some of this happen around the world as pilots are turning into implementation projects. I do think the private network space for industries is very interesting with 5G. 

You spoke on the importance of cyber-physical systems for digitisation and moving forward with 5G. Could you elaborate a bit on its criticality?

In my view, the cyber-physical systems idea is based on ‘what are the core infrastructure technologies that are needed to sustain progress?’. At Keysight, we think of it as a confluence of computation, connectivity and security. It is a very strong force that enables society to progress. 

The Prime Minister at IMC talked about India’s vision to be a net exporter of some of the technology work that's happening in the region. This is only possible if you have an ecosystem view and everybody's working on a common interpretation of the standards and a common roadmap. 

There are various technologies under development including 5G, GPUs and various node sizes coming up extending from 14 nanometres to seven nanometres, five nanometres to two nanometres, and even sub nanometer technologies. So, when you speak of making things smaller, the complexity goes up. But the power consumption has to be better. To make this happen, there has to be fundamental research to make the progression beyond 5G happen. It is not just about achieving 5G but about progressing to 6G and beyond.

Could you tell us about Keysight Technologies’ presence in India? How are you contributing to India's 5G journey?

We started our 5G program in the company in 2014. Being a design and test player, we often are on the front-end of these technologies. We get to invest early to build our capabilities. So, we're enabling our customers with the tools they need from design of chips, devices, networks (both wired and wireless). We also enable operator deployment scenarios. 

In India, we had partnered with IIT Madras for the early 5G test bed. And a lot of that work was leveraged from the technology stack we built up and also customised locally in India. This was done by our teams in the region that are doing R&D work.

We also partner with the telecom operators to enable them to bring some of the deployment challenges they have back into the lab. We are solving the problems at the design phase in the lab so that deployments happen in an easier manner. We're also enabling the Open RAN ecosystem to continue to accelerate software transformation of the network with high levels of confidence and interoperability. 

Also Read: Why 5G Will Become More About Enterprise Use Cases Than Consumer