Eight institutions collaborating to help develop 5G network
With an objective to boost 5G ecosystem within India and to achieve the objectives of Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Make in India initiatives, the Government has decided to offer the use of Indigenous 5G Test Bed free of cost to the Indian Government recognized start-ups and MSMEs for the next six months up to Jan 2023.
It is available at a very nominal rate to all other stakeholders, Ministry of Communications said on 8 Aug 2022.
Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is encouraging R&D Institutions, Equipment Manufacturers among others to utilise the 5G Test Bed facilities and expertise to test and facilitate the speedy development and deployment of their products in the network.
Keeping in view India’s specific requirements and to take lead in 5G deployment, DoT has approved financial grant for the multi-institute collaborative project to set up ‘Indigenous 5G Test Bed’ in India in March 2018 with total cost of Rs.224 crore.
The eight collaborating institutes in the project are IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Madras, IIT Delhi, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IISc Bangalore, Society for Applied Microwave Electronics Engineering & Research (SAMEER) and Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology (CEWiT).
Indigenous 5G Test Bed enables R&D teams of Indian academia and industry to validate their products, prototypes, algorithms and demonstrate various services.
Further, it provides complete access for research teams to work on novel concepts, ideas holding potential for standardization in India and on global scale.
It provides the facilities of 5G networks for experimenting and demonstrating applications and use cases of importance to Indian society like rural broadband, smart city applications and intelligent transport system (ITS). It will help to Indian operators to understand the working of 5G technologies and plan their future networks.
The development of this Indigenous Test Bed is a key milestone step for India’s becoming self-reliant in the 5G Technology domain and now leading towards 5G Aatmanirbhar Bharat.
This Test Bed is providing the Indigenous capability for testing and validation of 5G products being developed and manufactured by Indian start-ups, MSME, R&D, Academia and industry users. This has resulted in huge cost efficiency and reduced design time due to which Indian 5G products are likely to become market competitive globally.
The development of this Test Bed has also resulted into development of many 5G Technologies and IPs which are available for technology transfer to Industry players for smooth and speedy deployment of 5G in India, said the Ministry. fiinews.com
