India is very close to getting its first commercial 5G network. There’s no saying which telco would be the first to launch it, but with the arrival of 5G, the business landscape of India will change forever. Sanjay Raina, Vice President, Sales for India & South Asia, Mavenir, told TelecomTalk that 5G is not just a connectivity story that we had in the past. “4G, for example, was, you know, kind of helping YouTubers and the other form of communication which needed those kinds of speeds. But 5G comes with a very different paradigm,” said Raina. Raina also talked about how 5G would benefit multiple industries, including agriculture, manufacturing, and more. He also shared multiple use-cases that would be enabled for different industry verticals once 5G arrives (watch the video interview on YouTube to get the full conversation).
Q. How is Mavenir’s Cloud-Native Open RAN Approach Changing the Traditional Telecom Market?
The first paradigm shift was when the networks were made virtual, but the second we progressed further, there were certain challenges in the VM-based implementation of the cloud. So, we moved to the cloud-native. The cloud-native basically brings cost efficiency, more granularity in terms of service level quality, and better management of the application and the other hardware. There’s an element of micro-services which comes into play wherein you can just choose a container environment, and if there’s any change to be done on any application, only that container would be picked up, and the rest will keep on moving. Another dimension that it brings is the CICD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment). That is another thing which dynamically keeps giving additional lever to an operator in terms of any openness to be created, any integration to be created with the external world, so that opens up a lot of things. You can’t stay at proprietary technology as it won’t give you the game.
Q. You recently partnered with Airtel, Are You also in Talks with Vodafone Idea and Jio as well?
Yes, we are in talks with various operators at the moment, so I can’t name any of them.
Q. When will the Shift to ORAN come in India?
I think in the next six to eight months, you should be able to see large chunks in India, and 5G is our one of our key bets. There’s a lot more, listen to the complete conversation on the video above, or you can also directly go to the YouTube channel of TelecomTalk.
