Mobile gaming will be worth billions and could be a latent opportunity for 5G comms service providers says Airtel CTO
An Open RAN consortium including Ericsson, Nokia and Indian mobile operator Bharti Airtel claims to have successfully demonstrated cloud gaming in the country over a 5G network, reports Developing Telecoms.
Cloud gaming will be one of the biggest use cases of 5G and could provide major revenue streams for mobile operators across the world, according to Randeep Sekhon, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Bharti Airtel. However, mobile gaming’s success hinges on high speeds, low latency and complete reliability.
The gaming demonstration was conducted as part of the ongoing 5G trials on the 3500 MHz high capacity spectrum band, in Manesar, Gurgaon.
Can’t afford latency in mobile gamesÂ
For the 5G cloud game demo, Airtel partnered with India’s leading gamers Mortal (AKA Naman Mathur) and Mamba (Salman Ahmad) and used Blacknut’s gaming tech system. It involved a sprint racing challenge on Asphalt in which ultra-low latency is vital.
In tests, Airtel’s 5G network had a latency of 10ms and a downloads ran at 1 Gbps.
Mobile gaming will evolve into a USD 2.4 billion market opportunity said Airtel’s Sekhon. In India alone a base of 436 million online gamers is expected to reach 510 million by 2022, Airtel said.
Airtel is conducting 5G trials in multiple cities across India and validating technologies and is creating its use cases using the trial spectrum allotted by the Indian Department of Telecom. Airtel is ‘spearheading’ development withing the O-RAN Alliance.