BT to expand India hub, develop premium 5G use-cases: CDIO Harmeen Mehta

“We are in India because of the amazing tech skills that we find there. A large part of our data and AI teams have been based here – we started building them in India at least three years back, when I took over. We accelerated that quite a lot and made India as one of the biggest data and AI hubs," Mehta told Mint in an exclusive conversation.

Having doubled its headcount in India over the past three years, BT intends to scale up its presence in core engineering, data and AI.

“We are looking at actually the digital part, helping the operations team accelerate both our efficacy and efficiency in the ops part using AI as well," Mehta said. 

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Given that both the digital and the operations teams sit in India, the country is a very valuable hub for BT, she said.

With new quality-of-service norms for mobile and broadband usage on the anvil, Mehta said India should focus more on ensuring better broadband services because the segment would drive growth in the coming years as more homes get connected with fibre and the nation becomes more digital even though it’s a mobile-first country.

Accelerating broadband

“It's one of the fastest-growing nations in the world and as it becomes much more of a digital nation, the need for ultrahigh speed broadband is going to be far more so. I think for telcos to accelerate that would be very much in their interest," she said.

Mehta added that with rising convergence of services, networks will be needed increasingly for creating seamless connectivity inside and outside the home.

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Monetisation of 5G investments continues to be a challenge the world over. Telcos have spent billions on building 5G networks but have been unable to recoup these investments for lack of premium use-cases. With 5G becoming the default network globally, use-cases that can be charged a premium may begin to come about. According to Mehta, unless you have the big use-cases, you can't really sell them at a premium.

“The more we concentrate on developing more and more use-cases and differentiation, the easier it will become to monetise," she said.

The senior executive said AI-based 5G use-cases were coming up in a big manner globally as adoption by industries was rising, as opposed to a couple of years ago when telcos had pinned their hopes on private 5G, which had taken off much slower.

“The biggest shift I'm seeing in the industry, it's becoming less about it being a new technology, but much more about what can you do with it... the new rise in gaming and probably a lot more happening around both AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality) and other things that you can do on top of 5G. I think as the world evolves and with the use of AI, and as that gets embedded in both handsets and use-cases and almost everything you do, I think the adoption will probably accelerate a bit," she said.

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Mehta also pointed to the evolution of chipsets on handsets that were now picking up the larger compute load, which when coupled with the adoption of cloud, was putting that much more pressure on networks to ensure that the quality of services remains steady. She added that BT was working with hardware makers, handset companies and networks to find that right balance.

“The good thing is that AI actually feeds very well into 5G because it is ultralow latency use-cases. It is all real time. But whether how much of that is going to have an impact, I think we've got to let it play out a bit more, but it's definitely good," she said.