Bharti, Reliance Jio tooled up for indigenous 5G network trials

India’s tryst with “Make in India” 5G telecom networks has taken a giant leap with the Bharti Airtel-Tata combine and Reliance Jio making trials based on their own equipment.

Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal has said its 5G trials with the Tatas (who are building the 5G stack, which includes the core and radio) are expected to begin in April-May next year, well before it starts deploying commercial networks in the country.

TCS is planning to supply its 4G stack with state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd and Mittal has said it will try them out.

He pointed out with the Chinese vendors not being allowed in the 5G space, there was space for another vendor to come in.

He said executives of TCS and Bharti Airtel had formed forums and were working together to make it happen.

The Tatas recently bought Tejas Network, which used to supply transmissions and backhaul for Bharti Airtel.

Mittal said: “We have missed this opportunity many times, when telecom equipment players, instead of coming to India, went to China or Vietnam. We need to get manufacturing back into India and I see light at the end of the tunnel and we can become a big player.”

Reliance Jio has started trial runs of its indigenous 5G core, 5G RAN in Navi Mumbai, for which it has received government permission. According to sources, it has verified the network-slicing capability for a real-time streaming entertainment slice, using its own 5G RAN and 5G standalone combo core.

The company had earlier tested its 5G core on a Verizon network in the US last year, while waiting for spectrum to be given by the Indian government.

The move is significant because building indigenous network capabilities will go a long way in making India in a key player in the 5G Open RAN network arena.

A senior executive of Bharti Airtel pointed out: “India has one of the most complex telecom networks. If the network works here, it will work in any other part of the world.”

The push towards indigenous manufacturing was kicked off initially last June with Reliance Jio announcing that it would build and export its own 5G network. It was also given a fillip with the government introducing a production-linked incentive scheme for telecom equipment in the same month with incentives of over Rs 12,195 crore. The scheme has attracted over 33 companies, including Nokia, Flextronics, Jabil, Foxconn, HFCL, and Tejas (now Tatas).

The push was not limited to private telcos. In November last year a technical committee set up by the Department of Telecommunications to decide on the technical parameters for reworking the terms for BSNL’s 4G network bidding (the earlier rules were cancelled after domestic operators said they had no place in it) also pushed the state-owned company to use Indian-made core for 4G.

In June this year Bharti tied the knot with the Tatas in announcing a deal to collaborate on building 5G networks. Business Standard News