Your final IPL experience may have been completely different with 5G, but…

With this set, the way you watched the IPL final this weekend could be completely different. Picture this: you are sitting in the MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai, high in the galleries, among tens of thousands of roaring fans. Far down the pitch, your favorite player is about to make a straight cut straight to the boundary. You see it, you understand what happened, and then you pull out your phone to view the same thing from a much closer angle that’s impossible from where you’re sitting.

Or from another point of view. Or in slow motion. You can also get into the bowler hat (or cheerleader) action! Whatever your pain points, delivering it in ultra-high definition as a premium service, whether on stands or in the living room, is one of the new value-adds that 5G can offer thanks to differentiated connectivity and network sharing with 5G.

And “could” because it hasn’t become a reality yet. At least not in time for the upcoming IPL final, as India’s net neutrality rules prohibit internet users from having such varying speeds and premium services.

Still, Ericsson, one of the world’s leading information and communications technology companies, has high hopes for it. Last year at Mobile World Congress, a toolkit was unveiled that included software capabilities for Massive MIMO, RAN slicing, time-critical communications, and 5G core. It is aimed at anyone from mobile operators to OTT channels who could use it to offer differentiated premium services like the IPL scenario described above.

“The advent of 5G opens up new opportunities,” said Ericsson India Managing Director Nitin Bansal. “Diversified connectivity not only ensures efficient network connectivity on demand, but will represent a significant change in the evolution of the mobile broadband industry in India.”

While regulations will prevent such premium services in India in the near future, they have already been tried in other countries. At the recent F1 Grand Prix in Singapore, SingTel collaborated with Ericsson to offer network access to the crowds who gathered to watch the world’s fastest drivers battle it out on the streets of the city-state. The bundled offer combined with 5G meant that any user sitting in one seat could use their mobile device to access live, low-latency action from another corner of the racetrack that might not be visible to them.

The technology was showcased on Wednesday at Ericsson’s ‘Imagine Live’ roadshow in Gurugram as part of Ericsson’s efforts to boost the adoption of 5G value-added services in the country even as telcos struggle to find a way to monetize the premium feature amid complaints of call drops and the actual quality of 5G coverage, which does not meet excessive claims and expectations.

“5G is about enabling and performing,” Bansal said, adding: “We will continue to invest in India and continue to do what is expected of us… Looking to the future, the emergence of programmable networks and exposing network capabilities to applications, developers present the next exciting achievement.”