Vodafone India makes network IoT-ready, adopts new 4G and 5G technologies

Vodafone India is working on creating a complete Internet of Things or IoT vision for the company to tap new and existing opportunities in the country

NEW DELHI: Vodafone India, the country’s second-largest telecom operator, is working on creating a complete Internet of Things or IoTvision for the company to tap new and existing opportunities in the country, besides adopting new technologies around 4G and 5G, a top executive said.

“Telecom has in past been treated as a separate vertical. Now, with the Internet of Things and all other trends, we are going to become horizontal. That means we are going to be essential in any of the industry that you can think of...we are also very intently working on creating an IoT vision,” Vishant Vora, director – technology at Vodafone India, told ET, in a recent interaction.

Vora said that the society in India is going to be transformed with the advent of the Internet of things, faster mobile connectivity, cloud and smart networks.

We are right in the middle of the transformation. To connect all kinds of devices places a very different emphasis and burden upon us as an industry and the company. That is to make sure that we are providing the most robust and secure services to our consumers as well as our enterprise clients,” he said.

Vodafone India, which is currently in a process to merge operations with Aditya Birla Group-owned Idea Cellular, is also adopting technologies to virtualise its network in India to improve service delivery and time-to-market.

We at Vodafone have been very busy creating a smart network, which is a network of the future, which helps us do many of these things. We have been at the forefront of the introduction of things like Self Optimising Networks (SON), and we are also at the forefront in putting virtualized networks,” Vora said.

For for 4G and 5G, Vodafone India is putting all technologies that are mature and ready for use and bring in business benefits immediately, Vora said. “We are working on a network which is going to be superior for connecting all our clients.”

The executive feels that 5G technology is still a few years away, but Vodafone is already bringing some of 5G technologies like massive MIMO into 4G and applying them. “We are conducting trials of this technology. It is very futuristic in 5G, but we are using it in 4G. There will be many other things that we will be bringing into our networks,” he said.

The telecom operator claims to have the best latency in India of any network. Vora said that latency has been Vodafone’s number one priority.

“As you connect more and more machines, and you get into the world of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, latency becomes very important. We have designed our networks very uniquely for that,” Vora said.