Telcos, vendors, chipmakers term 5Gi as risky technology; want objective assessment by DoT

Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and top gear makers and chipset vendors have termed the Indian 5G standard, 5Gi, as a “risky” technology and said that their consistent persuasion by to conduct an objective and holistic assessment of the standard within TSDSI were met with outright rejection.

In their joint submission to the Department of Telecommunications, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, ZTE, Altiostar, Mavenir and Mediatek urged the TEC to conduct theoretical verification and field level validation of performance gains of the 5Gi standard before taking any call to make it mandatory for 5G deployment in the country.

The DoT recently invited public comments on adoption of 5Gi towards IMT 2020 into national standard by the Telecommunications Engineering Center (TEC). The last date for submitting comments was August 15, 2021.

“Unfortunately, there are no clear established gains of 5Gi, which are practically validated,” they said in their submission.

These companies said that it is a universally acknowledged fact that the fundamental premise or basis for the modification of the global 3GPP standard, in an exceptional situation, must be based on significant gains in cost, performance and network efficiencies (spectrum, power, etc.).

“While enhancing the rural coverage was the fundamental premise in making those modifications to the 3GPP, it soon ended up modifying additional aspects that had no relevance to the low-mobility large-coverage scenario for rural coverage. Moreover, any of these performance gains are yet to be proven on a commercial scale,” the said.

They added it is well established that 3GPP 5G radio and the radio based on 5Gi are non-interoperable, which means, any handset based on 3GPP based implementation will not work with 5Gi based infrastructure and vice versa.

Additionally, this will lead to a challenge in international roaming of subscribers having 3GPP based 5G smartphones to roam in India with 5Gi based implementation. Companies added that Indian customers having 5Gi based smartphones will face challenges when they roam globally as their 5Gi smartphone would be non-interoperable with 3GPP based 5G infra deployed in more than 150 countries.

Global handsets based on 3GPP based specification would need hardware change to comply with 5Gi based specifications, thereby handset makers would incur additional costs for the same, making the new skew based on 5Gi specification to be of a higher cost than globally shipped 3GPP based devices.

“It would also lead to delays in availability of such 5Gi based skews as the OEMs would have to re-design and establish separate production lines for these new skews. Overall, it would lead to delays and higher cost, which is contrary to the objectives of driving down the cost of 5G for consumers in India,” they added.

“Non interoperability between 5Gi and 3GPP will necessitate the need for a dedicated licensed spectrum for both technologies. This would call for additional investment from operators, those who wish to deploy 5Gi and 3GPP,” private players said.

The private telecom companies said that the draft TEC standard, also named 5Gi, builds itself upon the 3GPP Rel-15 5G NR specifications for the most part, albeit using an older-version of the latter.

“This is because the TSDSI 5Gi is completely leaning on the specifications developed by 3GPP for its foundational aspects, over which TSDSI made unilateral technical modifications leaving it incompatible with the foundation specifications,” they said.

“This was also evident when TSDSI formally informed the ITU-R WP 5D that technical changes have been applied on select 3GPP specifications in the creation of their candidate technology submission. Due to the incompatibility between the 3GPP and TSDSI specifications, ITU-R classified them as two independent technology candidates based on their respective standards,” they said in their submission.

Telcos and vendors warned that the lack of technical completeness and ambiguity with the 5Gi specifications in the description of protocols, conformance etc., will lead to failure in the implementation and the successful productization of such standards, further leading to the lack of interest in the adoption by consumers of the technology.

It is expected that the TEC as the SSO for India should ascertain that the national standards it creates are complete, error-free, and implementable for the creation of a meaningful ecosystem & seamless deployment of telecom networks, they added.

The evolution of the draft TEC standard (5Gi) has inevitable dependence on a small group of members within TSDSI, telcos and vendor said, adding that the local standard has tight dependence on the future 3GPP specifications which is a matter of concern noticed and cognized by the 3GPP PCG meeting at their meeting in April 2021.

“Therefore, with specifications that are limited by a pre Rel-15 version from the 3GPP, there is no guarantee nor confidence with industry that it would seamlessly keep evolving. Neither is interoperability possible with the 3GPP standards,” they added.

Explaining implications, companies said that in the current form, the current draft 5GI specification cannot evolve further without breaking backward compatibility with the products if built based on the 5Gi specifications.

“Forward compatibility is an essential aspect to any specification evolution process. There is no scope of future releases and new features of 3GPP releases to be added into 5Gi without breaking compatibility with any product (e.g., network, device, test-equipment) based on current 5Gi release.

Telcos have also claimed that 5Gi will not enable them to deploy 3GPP-compliant Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) technology to use same band for both 4G and 5G radios, making their 5G service unsustainable.