India to See First Deployment of 5G by 2020

The technologies namely 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G will co-exist, but when 5G comes, from an Indian context, 3G will take a slow pace because as you move forward in Gs (4G to 5G), the technology becomes more efficient India will see the first deployment of 5G by 2020, says Sanjay Kaul, MD (India & SAARC) at Cisco Systems. However, egacy technologies such as 2G will be around for 5-7 years due to the existence of a huge number of feature phones in the country, Kaul tells Tina Gurnaney in an interview.Edited excerpts:
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What kind of trends do you see when it comes to data adoption in the country?
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If you look at last three years, the amount of data we produced is equal to entire amount of data that we produced in the country for the last 30 years. Our prediction says that it will continue to grow at a faster pace.It owes to the technologies that we have in place like 4G, Wi-Fi, which is emerging as a common resource.Also, our behaviour as users on social networks has really helped boom the data.In last one year after Reliance Jio aunch, data has reached the next evel because it came free and it really proved that there was a hunger for consuming data and I think all that is good news for the industry.
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How do you see older technologies like 2G, 3G coexisting with newer technologies like 4G, 5G?
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We are a huge country with a huge pyramid where my sense is that 2G will survive at least another five years even though it is an old technology because there are a lot of feature phones still out there and they need to be supported. But in India, four worlds exist, you need to provide for all segments. The technologies namely 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G will coexist but when 5G comes, from an Indian context, 3G will take a slow pace because as you move forward in Gs, 4G to 5G, the technology becomes more efficient and particularly 5G technology has number of inherent advantages--you can do network slicing, it is ready for IoT (Internet of Things) kind of support.