As part of the ongoing 5G trials in India, Vodafone Idea said that it has partnered with Ericsson to trial 5G use cases in healthcare sector in remote parts of the country. Vi has been allocated 26 GHz mmWave band by the DoT, along with the traditional 3.5 GHz spectrum band in Pune, for 5G network trials.
The company has used Ericsson Radios and Ericsson Dual Mode Core based on cloud native technology comprising 5G SA, 5G NSA & LTE packet core functions for the trial.
Based on the high data speed, low latency and reliability of 5G, a doctor located in an urban center can actually carry out an ultrasound scan on a patient who is in a remote rural location, said Vi.
As part of the ongoing demonstrations, Vi and Ericsson also demonstrated the Enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and fixed wireless access (FWA) applications with 5G.
ViBack in September, Vi said that it achieved a peak 5G speed of 3.7 Gbps with very low latency on the mmWave spectrum band during trials.
Commenting on the same, Jagbir Singh, CTO, Vi, said:
Vi has developed a 5G ready network which builds on India’s fastest Vi GIGAnet network verified by Ookla. With our 5G trials now, we are leveraging the power of 5G to provide healthcare access to remote parts of the country, amongst a range of other use cases for enterprises and consumers. Speed and latency are critical to 5G services, and therefore, our focus has been to achieve throughputs which can effectively enable relevant 5G use cases for the Digital India of tomorrow.
Amarjeet Singh, Vice President, Ericsson, said:
Enhanced mobile broadband and Fixed Wireless Access are expected to be the early use-cases for 5G in India. Over time, we expect more enterprise related use cases to come up leveraging the benefits of 5G in sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, education etc. The flexible Dual Mode Core set by Ericsson with Vi in Pune is helping enterprises leverage the network to deploy use cases like Remote video monitoring, Telemedicine, Digital twin, AR/VR etc. during the ongoing trials.