Empowering Sri Lanka with 5G
Today, we live in a world where digital world does a tremendous work on everything. With the revolution of information and communication technologies, the way people live and work has been changing to the extent that there is no turning back. This Covid 19 pandemic has made that digitalization speedier erasing all the options to be non-digital. This situation has driven the world where work from home and distance learning is indispensable. Most of the organizations and educational institutes had to enable their ICT capabilities to get employees, people and students to engage in their works remotely. Schools and universities have transformed to support online learning. Many jobs have become entirely remote as we never expected or experienced before. For the vast majority of people, social media is the only way to socialize. Therefore, the need of the hour is to empower the digital facilities as if facilities such as reducing traffic congestion were provided for the employees in those days.
Basically, 5G can be identified as a single network which is able to handle a variety of different use cases. It may lead to improve bandwidth and capabilities and reduce network-generated delays. Definitely, it can change tomorrow's world more than today to the point where we can’t even imagine. It will be appropriated in many applications which are not viable today. It will create transformational changes in everything. It will be a significant enabler for various kinds of industries such as Autonomous Vehicles, Smart City Infrastructure and Traffic Management, Industrial Automation, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).
Empowering organizations with ICT capabilities is much easier than empowering the scattered individuals who were not sufficiently facilitated with the fit for the purpose technologies to overcome issues such as frequent disconnection, very poor quality of video conferences, slow downloading and time taken in loading apps. The Internet of Things (IoT) and the Big date has become a very important piece of technology to realize high-level automation by machine to machine communications, smatter devices by connecting physical objects to each other and interactive personal assistant devices. All of the above requires increased security, both low latency and higher bandwidth and largely interconnected low power devices.
Currently in Sri Lanka, as statistics available in the public domain, the coverage of 4G LTE is about 70% of the populated area of the country. Numerous international Fiber Optic Cables, Countrywide Fiber Optic Cable network of two major telecommunication companies and wideband wireless point to point and point to multipoint networks being developed for corporate segment have enabled the corporate sector and some of the individuals to meet their day to day bandwidth requirements. But most of the individuals’ enterprises located not in urban locations face difficulties in getting at least connectivity with a minimum level of quality of service. As per the licensing conditions imposed by the regulator only one company is licensed to provide FTTH for the non-business sector while both companies can provide FTTH for the business sector which directs the normal public to choose wireless technologies such as 4G LTE as minimum enabling them to work from home, distance learning and some of the IoT applications though it does not provide required network capabilities.
When it comes to the 5G technology in Sri Lanka, several considerable factors should be mentioned. The government of Sri Lanka has declared a national project called “Gamata Sannivedanya” from which the telecommunication operators are supported with direct finance from the regulator as well as grating further investment tax concessions through the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka to achieve urgently needed 4G coverage throughout the country. To meet the backhauling requirement of the network a significant amount of investments are done in parallel to the 4G rollout in core network development. Most importantly, the base stations installed to meet current 4G requirements are capable of 5G including the antenna system and the core network will be 5G supported and capable. 3 major players of Sri Lanka have commenced pre-commercial 5G trials in candidate frequency bands of 2.6 GHz, 3.4 GHz and 3.5 GHz which identified by the regulator while one international equipment vendor conducts 5G testing. Though the commercial 5G launching would take some more time, the above developments including boosted investment for 5G enabled networks and the fact that Sri Lanka shows the demand for online real applications such as video conferencing, interactive activities, remote machine control, remote monitoring accelerate the 5G commercial launch.
Empowering Sri Lankan public with 5G is an important point that must be mentioned here. With the advancement of technology, people expect a better experience than conventional voice and data services providing value for money in applications such as un-interrupted online real-time interactive education, health care such as surgical operation by a doctor in another place, instant access to data, applications and their own files stored in the cloud, entertainment activities participating from a remote place, interactive gaming, many numbers of connected devices and remote monitoring, control and automation. This expectation will be realized by 5G empowering driverless vehicles, more road safety by moving towards smart cities, efficient traffic control, and conservation of energy, very high level of safety of people, disaster early warning systems and disaster catastrophe reduction.
When focusing on empowering Sri Lankan business with 5G, mainly massive IoT and industrial applications would reach to a very high level with the use of 5G ensuring mobility, flexibility, reliability and security. There is another fact that should not be forgotten. It is empowering Sri Lankan Service Providers with 5G. With the massive usage of expanded networks by the public as well as the business sector, their revenue will be increased exponentially creating a more viable and vibrant market segment.
5G will be an enormous enabler on empowering Sri Lanka through various sectors as mentioned above. It will take years for complete evolution to 5G. But definitely there is no doubt that it will be a different kind of revolution in our history.
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