Ericsson has established a Centre of Excellence (CoE) and Innovation Lab for 5G in India, at one of the premier institutes of the nation, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. This first -of-its-kind 5G Innovation Lab, has been set up by Ericsson for Indian industry and academia.
The Minister of State for Communications (I/C) and Minister of State for Railways, Manoj Sinha together with Börje Ekholm, President and CEO, Ericsson made this announcement. Speaking on the occasion, Manoj Sinha congratulated Ericsson for taking the lead in terms of setting up the first 5G Center of Excellence and Innovation Lab in the country and stated how the 5G Center of Excellence supports the Indian government’s plans to foster a robust and vibrant 5G ecosystem in the country in the next 2-3 years.
As per an Ericsson report, 5G enabled digitization revenue potential in India will be $27.3 billion by 2026. The Indian operators can generate additional revenue of $13 billion or half of the stated potential if they take up roles beyond being Connectivity and infrastructure providers to become service enablers and service creators. The largest opportunity will be seen in sectors like manufacturing, energy and utilities followed by public safety and health sectors. Some of the 5G use cases that could be implemented using the unique features of 5G technology include industrial control and automation, autonomous driving, safety and traffic efficiency services, hospital applications and medical data management amongst others.
Ericsson conducted India’s first 5G over the air beam tracking demonstration in the 3.5 GHz band using a pre-commercial end-to-end system including 5G-NR, VRAN and VCORE. The demonstration included 3GPP 5G NR Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna technology with adaptive beamforming and beam tracking techniques to deliver robust and sustained mobile broadband communications. By beam steering, a highly-focused beam, a stronger radio signal with higher data throughput is delivered over a greater distance using less energy. The results are spectral efficiency enhancement and gains for capacity, cell edge throughput and mean user throughput.
