India, Oct. 27 -- At some point, in some classroom, for some reason, most of us must have come across the term called 'cross-elasticity'. What seems like a chapter in Economics has profound implications in the world of technology. We never know when two technologies behave as tea and coffee, and when they play out as tea and milk. When they compete as margarine and butter, and when they become pally-pally enough to work as hot dogs and buns. And the most interesting one-when they are neither. When they give an elasticity-cold shoulder to each other, that matches that of a handbag to a car tyre.

The way the Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving makes us view 5G through a curious lens. These two technologies have their spawning grounds, gra...