How 5G Will Alter Our Socio-economic Landscape?

Most of us would agree that technology is a means to a larger end. Nokia believes that technology connects us to the people we love, to our work and studies, and the critical services we need. Developing countries like India are looking to leverage technology as the great equaliser – allowing them to leapfrog generations of incremental progress in multiple areas to land at the same place as developed nations.

When our Prime Minister unveiled 5G at the India Mobile Congress in October, he did much more than providing impetus to the Digital Bharat mission. With a receptive consumer market, mature service providers and software and application developers coming together to create an ecosystem of sorts, 5G is set to forever alter our socio-economic landscape.

Let’s consider the social lives of our middle class. India is one of the largest consumers of data on per capita basis, even without the 5G rollout. As per Nokia’s Mbit report, this is now forecast to grow to 49 Gb/month by 2026. By then, mobile 5G services are forecast to generate $9 billion, equivalent to 37.7 per cent of total mobile service revenue. The increase in uptake of data will be tremendous as consumers do more with 100x speeds and stabler connections. While most of this will provide a boost to conventional broadband applications like entertainment and social use, the possibilities for service sectors like healthcare, transport and education are enormous as direct, digital service experiences become the norm.

Digital to intensify
Ways of finance, trade and commerce will undergo rapid changes as the digital rupee looks to offer a safer alternative to the cryptos. With falling 5G device prices, the street vendor accepting digital payments can take a step beyond to sell on grocery sales platforms. Entrepreneurs and small businesses can access the cloud more easily and realise their ecommerce ambitions. And all of this may not be necessarily expensive in relative terms of investment versus benefit.

During Covid, there were many individuals and small and medium enterprises alike, who were not set up to participate in the digital economy. But now, with the advent of 5G, we could play catch up. In fact, our research found that 5G enabled industries have the potential to add $8 trillion to the global GDP by 2030.

Connectivity and digitalisation enable us to collaborate and innovate, engage with our communities and families, and make our industries more productive and efficient. The solutions we provide can help resolve many of the social and economic challenges facing the world today, bringing more inclusive access to opportunity, basic social services and enabling human rights, and restoring falling productivity through digitalisation of industry and society, beyond the planetary and climate positive impacts. Design for sustainability, green operations and digital transformations are coming together with the fourth Industrial Revolution: Industry 4.0.

A solid digitalisation foundation may have helped online retailers and web services companies address the big spike in demand for online goods and services during the pandemic, but many companies have only scratched the surface of digitalisation’s potential to generate significant value in terms of increased safety, productivity and efficiency (SPE). The speed and scale with which they are able to respond makes them resilient in the face of changes in supply and demand brought about by future shocks. Digital industries such as online retail, media and banking have already realised much of their digitalisation potential, but physical industries like manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, logistics, mining and energy utilities have lagged significantly. Today, the ratio of information and communications technology (ICT) investment between digital and physical industries is 70:30—even though the proportion of their respective GDP contributions is 30:70. This disparity is the new opportunity for inversion.

The gap between physical industries and their digital counterparts may be wide, but we believe that it can be bridged with 5G+ technologies; the essential infrastructure that merges enterprise ICT and industrial OT, and, as the “plus” in 5G+ implies, extends well beyond 5G network infrastructure.

Physical industries are now on the brink of making major ICT investments over the next decade. Each industry will optimize the use of 5G+ technologies to digitally augment themselves to realize new safety, productivity and efficiency benefits at faster speeds and scale.

We aim to enable businesses and society to digitalise and leverage the full potential of the technology – be it environmental, social or economic benefits. The solutions we provide help to make industries more efficient, more productive while creating less waste and encouraging greater reuse of precious resources. Not just that, we also aim to reduce our own emissions by 50 per cent across the value chain, including own operations, products in use, logistics, and final assembly supplier factories by 2030. We are committed to transforming India into a sustainable and digitally connected society.

                                                                      Author

Amit Marwah, CMO, Nokia India