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KOLKATA: Imagine top doctors remotely guiding and training healthcare staff in the frontlines to treat Covid-19 patients via uninterrupted, live video calls with no buffering. High-end HD cameras with split screens coaching doctors and nurses on ways to securely don personal protective gear before treating patients up close. For that matter, picture an army of robots administering life-saving drugs to running ventilators in a packed Covid-19 ward to shield doctors from catching the killer virus known the world over to be super-contagious. Or the faint hum of remote controlled mobile trolleys armed with cameras engaged in continuous Covid-19 ward inspections, come rain or shine.These scenes aren’t straight out of a sci-fi movie, but real live scenarios that transpired less than two months ago and helped China effectively combat Covid-19. A critical piece of ammo the Chinese had in this deadly battle was access to ultra-fast 5G — or fifth generation – wireless broadband networks. In fact, the hours of live video calls and video-conferencing to guide Chinese medical workers in the frontlines happened over 5G networks and the HD cameras, hospital robots and remote-controlled mobile trolleys were also powered by 5G.India too has set in motion extended nationwide lockdowns till May 3 to contain the spread of Covid-19, but telecom industry experts believe the country would have been on a much stronger footing to grapple with the deadly menace if 5G networks were up and running today. At a time when the pandemic is yet to peak in India, access to 5G technologies and delivery of telemedicine solutions over 5G networks, they say, could have come handy, especially to do critical back-end work such as effective contact tracing in these times of Covid.Singapore-based Nitin Soni, senior director (corporates) at global ratings agency, Fitch, says the government must swiftly cut price of 5G airwaves and prioritise speedy 5G rollouts in India to deal effectively with the pandemic. Faster 5G adoption, he says, will aid delivery of remote healthcare to fight Covid-19 in India and also support higher GDP growth.“Telcos have said 5G spectrum price is expensive, which if reduced by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) along with an auction this year itself, could accelerate 5G adoption,” says Soni. He added that ringing in this fast wireless broadband technology must be an absolute priority for India to also address the increase in data traffic amid lockdowns and social distancing measures triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.Experts say a big enabler that drove China to unleash the power of 5G in Wuhan – the global epicentre of Covid19 — was its solid local citizen identification system, mapped to their faces. By comparision, India’s challenges, they say, could get bigger as it neither has 5G networks nor the structured citizen-related meta data, and would, accordingly, have to rely on surrogate inputs that may be less reliable as a foundation for critical decisions while battling Covid-19.“A key use case advantage of having a 5G network is that it allows a country to undertake real-time face recognition to effectively combat Covid19 in hotspots, and in turn, do precise contact tracing…this also allows one to generate empirical evidence to ascertain actual people-to-people interface while grappling with a pandemic,” says ex-Bharti Airtel CEO Sanjay Kapoor.Top executives at China’s Huawei, which was at the forefront of the tech-backed medical interventions in Wuhan, acknowledge that access to 5G technologies was hugely helpful in fighting Covid-19, especially when the mystery virus had threatened to swiftly overwhelm the country’s healthcare system.“Access to 5G helped us fight Covid-19 effectively in Wuhan and other places in China, where Huawei with its ecosystem partners developed multiple on-ground 5G use cases for live video streaming, remote diagnosis/treatment and remote protection to medical staff,” says Huawei India CEO David Li, adding that the fast broadband technology was particularly helpful in managing on-ground communication challenges.A host of 5G tools, he says, also enabled remote sharing of expert medical advice, addressing healthcare staff shortages at new hospitals/shelters for Covid-19 patients. Ultrasonic 5G robots, in turn, did contact-less checks while other 5G tools were deployed for more complex tasks such as remote gene-sequencing to bolster detection techniques and treatment.Small wonder, analysts believe India ought to emulate these learnings from China and expedite steps to bring 5G to fight the pandemic. More so, since India has slipped behind the likes of China, South Korea, Japan and US amongst others on 5G implementation.“The Covid-19 outbreak has led us to the fundamental question of how prepared are we to handle disasters, natural or man-made… important, transformational, technology interventions of 5G, IoT and industry 4.0 could be blended to create a roadmap which can ensure continuity of essential economic and governance activities without putting peoples’ lives at risk,” says Faisal Kawoosa, founder and chief analyst, techARC, in a recent note seen by ET.Telcos, on their part, assert that the Covid-19 outbreak has underlined the criticality of the telecoms industry globally, and its role in preventing mass-scale business disruptions, especially when people are compelled to work from home. The government, they say, must quickly realise this and hasten steps to save the industry, instead of bleeding it in the aftermath of the recent AGR shock.Rajan Mathews, director general of Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), refuses to get drawn into any talk about `India without 5G’ being on a sticky wicket versus China, when it comes to battling the pandemic effectively.“Unless telcos are financially viable, deployment of 5G networks won’t happen…the recommended price of 5G spectrum is exorbitant in India compared to many developed countries, and it would be difficult for telcos to buy such expensive spectrum and then roll out networks,” says Mathews.The COAI represents Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea. Brokerage Axis Capital though recently said India’s 5G spectrum sale is unlikely before August 2020 at the earliest with the DoT having reportedly postponed the auction that was earlier scheduled in April due to the continuing financial stress in India’s debt-laden telecom industry. With countrywide lockdowns the new normal amid a rising Covid-19 death toll, experts believe a spectrum sale even this August could be a tad ambitious.A section of industry experts say some telemedicine solutions deployed in China could also run on India’s 4G networks, provided the quality of connectivity is top-notch. But that quickly say that could be a tough call to execute on ground, given that telco networks in India are already seeing a massive surge in voice and data services consumption as corporate staff across the country operate from their homes amid extended lockdowns.Kapoor is cautiously optimistic, and says a reasonable degree of remote health management and treatment could be done with 4G networks. He also believes Arogya Setu could be a handy, low-bandwidth app as it runs on 3G/4G networks and can be pretty effective in educating people and in tracking/identifying people movement, and in guiding them to avoid risk prone Covid-19 zones to control its spread.Rajat Mukarji, director general of Broadband India Forum (BIF), though says its imperative that more trials and 5G use cases are facilitated quickly and clear investment cases established. “5G is a big opportunity for India but multiple use cases in many fields such as healthcare, manufacturing and agriculture need to be developed in India…affordability and mass volumes need to be established convincingly to ensure 5G succeeds in the country”.Some experts though say that more than the absence of 5G, a bigger chink in India’s present telecoms infrastructure armoury is the dismal state of fibre networks, which could jolt near-term efforts to leverage 4G broadband networks to support the country’s healthcare setup.Soni of Fitch says India’s big worry is the lack of quality fibre network infrastructure and patchy in-building mobile coverage. Fibre infrastructure, he says, needs to be beefed up to do things like live video streaming inside hospitals for treating Covid-19 patients in India or even undertake remote monitoring of live patient data, or arranging doctor consultations remotely from multiple locations.COAI’s Mathews, in turn, says the government must explore ways to restore the sector’s financial health and boost the liquidity levels of telcos — especially those stung by the Supreme Court’s AGR verdict — so that they can make the necessary investments in networks, new technologies such as 5G and fiberisation to effectively grapple with emergencies sparked off by Covid-19.Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel are estimated to owe the government as much as Rs 58,254 crore and Rs 43,980 crore respectively, in the aftermath of the apex court’s October 2019 verdict that widened the definition of AGR.The nation’s top court has already scrapped self-assessment of AGR dues but has agreed to consider the government’s plea of allowing impacted telcos such as VIL and Airtel to stagger payouts over 20 years or less. The matter will be taken up at the next hearing.At press time, Jio, Airtel and VIL did not reply to ET’s queries.
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