Existing Telecom Infrastructure Insufficient to Sustain the Metaverse, Huawei Official Says

While high-speed 5G networks are speeding up tech operations in India and around the world, the current telecommunications ecosystem is still not prepared to support metaverse technology that can be very demanding, according to Abhinav Purohit, the chief expert on business and strategy consulting for Huawei in the Middle East region. Based in China, Huawei is a telecom equipment provider, that is working on finetuning 5G Internet networks to attain its full potential. The metaverse “is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality”, according to Purohit.

High-end immersive technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) make for significant building blocks for the metaverse . In order for the technology to succeed as a fully functional virtual universe, it needs to be supported by high-speed Internet. As per Purohit, only 25 percent of the global population will have access to 5G by 2025.

“For the Metaverse to succeed, latency needs to improve and faster connectivity speeds are needed. Network bandwidth needs to be increased. The lags, packet drops, and network unreliability witnessed in today's 4G world makes the current state of the infrastructure unsuitable for building an envisioned metaverse experience. 5G will be the answer here,” an official post from the Huawei official said.

The market opportunity for the metaverse could reach $800 billion (roughly Rs. 59,58,700 crore) over the next two years, research reports suggest estimate.

Earlier this month, Nvidia had claimed that the automotive industries will soon begin to add a metaverse angle to their retail and industrial operations. With metaverse, automotive players are expected to increase the level of monitoring the vehicle production process. This would make implementing changes and modifications before it was late.

“The metaverse will allow geographically distant participants to enjoy realistic, spatially aware experiences. Delivering such an experience will require innovations in fields like hybrid local and remote real-time rendering, video compression, edge computing, and cross-layer visibility, as well as spectrum advocacy, work on metaverse readiness of future connectivity and cellular standards,” Purohit explains.

Latency, symmetric bandwidth, and quality of experience (QoS) are three parameters, that need to be powered by 5G or 6G Internet, to witness the metaverse grow to its full potential, he added.