The government has decided to offer the use of indigenous 5G testbed free of cost to government-recognised start-ups and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) up to January 2023 to boost 5G ecosystem within India and achieve the objectives of Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Make in India initiatives. It is available at a very nominal rate to all other stakeholders.
To this end, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has strongly urged all 5G stakeholders including industry, academia, service providers, research and development (R&D) institutions, government bodies, equipment manufacturers etc. to utilise the 5G testbed facilities and expertise to test and facilitate the speedy development and deployment of their products in the network.
The 5G testbed is available at five locations: An integrated testbed is available at the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology (CEWiT)/Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) Madras, while other testbeds are at IIT Delhi, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. CEWiT /IIT Madras offers an end-to-end testbed with various testing services for radio access network (RAN) level, physical layer (PHY) level etc. and other test equipment. Meanwhile, IIT Hyderabad has facilities for gNB testing, user equipment (UE) testing, end-to-end interoperability testing and narrowband-internet of things (NB-IoT) testing, while IISC Bangalore hosts the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) and 5G open-source testbed, IIT Kanpur hosts the base-band testbed and IIT Delhi hosts the NB-IoT and visible light communication (VLC) testbed.
According to the government, the end-to-end testbed is compliant with the global 3GPP standard and the ORAN standard. Indigenous 5G testbed provides an open 5G testbed that enables R&D teams of Indian academia and industry to validate their products, prototypes, and algorithms, and demonstrate various services. Further, it provides complete access for research teams to work on novel concepts and ideas holding potential for standardisation in India and on a global scale. It provides the facilities of 5G networks for experimenting and demonstrating important applications or use cases such as rural broadband, smart city applications and intelligent transport system (ITS), and shall help Indian operators to understand the working of 5G technologies and plan their future networks.
The development of the testbed is a key milestone step for the country in becoming self-reliant in the 5G technology domain and now leading towards 5G Aatmanirbhar Bharat. This testbed is providing the indigenous capability for testing and validation of 5G products being developed and manufactured by Indian start-ups, MSMEs, R&D, academia and industry users. This has resulted in huge cost efficiency and reduced design time due to which 5G products are likely to become market competitive globally. The development of this testbed has also resulted in further development of many 5G technologies which are available for technology transfer to industry players which shall facilitate the smooth and speedy deployment of 5G in India.
