'5G to make commercial appearance by 2020'

5G is likely to make a commercial debut by the end of 2020 at the 5th edition of Fraunhofer Innovation and Technology (FIT) Platform 2018, said Thomas Magedanz, German Professor at Fraunhofer FOKUS, Technical University of Berlin on Wednesday.

Elaborating about the 5G, which is a software-based communication platform, the professor said that the 5G infrastructure will consist of three fundamental pillars which are - a lot more of bandwidth for all users, a massive scale interconnection and communication between machines, and low latency of the communication between the machines.

"All three of these pillars make a very strong 5G infrastructure but it is highly unlikely to enable all three of these features in their 5G platform, " said the professor at the event.

Being a software-based platform, it is easily customisable and this enables 5G to be available for usage at various verticals, added he.

Gunther Grathwohl, Head of International Digital Dialogue, German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) said, " As Germany is good at engineering, India is good at software and we must collaborate to provide the best connectivity for rural areas."

"Fraunhofer is the Technology Resource Partner for Manufacturing in India (MoU with Department of Heavy Industry, Government of India), the Technology Partner for the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and the International Solar Alliance (ISA), ” Anandi Iyer, Director, Fraunhofer Office India.

Gopichand Katragadda, Group Chief Technical Officer, Tata Sons Ltd. said that for advanced research on the constituents of Industry 4.0, there are several Centres of Excellence that the company has established along with the government. The one at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur will focus on IoT based advanced manufacturing while the one at IIT, Madras which will focus on advanced materials among others, he added.