India and 5G

Recognizing that deploying a 5G network will have transformative impact on country’s socio-economic growth, including on multiple economic verticals such as Agriculture, Health, Banking, Railways, Education, Urban Development, Manufacturing, Water and Power, India’s focus is on development and rollout of 5G services at the earliest. The need of the hour is to secure the nation’s critical communication infrastructure through safe indigenous technologies, in a speedy and efficient manner. There is no safer alternative than to build home-grown solutions that could compete in the domestic as well as the global markets.

The fact that telecom technology is critical to India’s digital future, it becomes critical for both, the Indian private industry as well the government to collectively evolve and adopt a sustainable model for investing in indigenous research and development of 5G technologies and beyond. In the prevailing situation, unless a credible indigenous alternative is built for setting up and upgrading the nation’s telecom infrastructure in the upcoming 5G space, India may be forced to go with a far more expensive option of again becoming totally dependent on importing technologies from the global companies. There is no better time than now to develop homegrown 5G technology when telecom sector is already on the cusp of this next technology revolution.

C-DOT’s “India 5G Alliance”

Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) is a premier telecom technology center of Department of Telecommunications (DOT), Government of India. C-DOT has more than 3 decades of R&D experience in indigenous design, development and production of telecom technologies especially suited to the Indian landscape. It has been at the forefront of the Indian Telecom Network’s Digitization technologies. C-DOT’s product portfolio is a wide array of telecom technologies that include switching & routing, optical communication, wireless communication, mobile technologies, network security, advanced encryption techniques and Post-Quantum Cryptography based solutions, network management, M2M/IOT, Artificial intelligence/ machine learning and a host of other telecom software.

C-DOT has successfully completed trials of 4G solutions developed indigenously in partnership with TCS and Tejas. BSNL has placed an initial order for deployment of 4G core and RAN (Radio Access Network) across four zones in the country. C-DOT is now working to upgrade its 4G core to 5G NSA (Non-Standalone) by August, 2022. The government has also tasked C-DOT to deliver the 5G SA core as well as 5G RAN and other associated 5G technologies. Therefore, C-DOT is forming an alliance with multiple players from industry and academia to undertake collaborative research and development in 5G.

C-DOT intends to deliver a complete suite of 5G products over a three-year period. Sufficient budget allocation by the government has been made for this. The India 5G Alliance is being formed under the guidance of DOT. This Alliance proposes an umbrella project for bringing together various ongoing R&D efforts in the industry, academia, startups, etc. C-DOT will manage the project and provide necessary support, including financial assistance wherever needed, to enable creation and evolution of 5G for India. C-DOT’s India 5G Alliance will extend leadership, promote best practices, generate research ideas and provide technical & financial support to the ecosystem partners for 5G development & its deployment.

Ten separate consortiums listed below have been formed under this alliance for taking up indigenous 5G development in the areas:

• 5G SA (Standalone) Core Network consortium
• 5G Open RAN (Radio Access network) FR-1 consortium
• 5G Open RAN (Radio Access network) FR-2 consortium
• 5G Transport consortium
• 5G Applications consortium
• 5G Enterprise Network consortium
• 5G Data Analytics consortium
• 5G Network Management, Automation and Orchestration consortium
• 5G Security consortium
• 5G Device consortium

Each consortium will have members from industry and academic bodies who will bring different systems/sub-systems for the development of a market-ready product. For example, the RAN consortium will have players working in the area of RAN like the RU, DU, CU, RIC etc.