India will soon have its own big telecom equipment manufacturers

In the next two to three years India will have the capacity of have its own big telecom equipment manufacturers, Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) chief executive officer (CEO) Rajkumar Upadhyay said.

He said that India would have “at least 2-3 Ericssons, Huaweis and Nokias” as Upadhyay expressed confidence in India’s telecom equipment manufacturing capability.

In an exclusive interview with FE, he said that the Centre has already started receiving interest from other countries for its indigenous technology.

Founded in 1984, C-DOT is a government of India-owned telecom tech development centre. It was founded to design and develop digital exchanges.

It recently came into the limelight by developing India’s own 4G-5G technology stack. It is software that takes care of end-to-end call control over the network. The stack has been tested for launching 4G services by BSNL.

Upadhyay told FE that once the solutions are deployed successfully by BSNL, C-DOT will start partnering with other operators like Vodafone Idea, Bharti Airtel and Jio. He added that C-DOT is also working on 4G-5G radios. It will come up with 5G radios this year.

Upadhyay also said that the Centre’s push for domestic design and telecom equipment manufacturing will help India compete with global majors.

Talking about the companies that manufacture telecom equipment in India, he listed Ericsson, and Motorola which have manufacturing centres in India.

He called Chennai as the hub of such manufacturing and further said that Ericsson’s facility in the city conducts research and works on global delivery services.

Finland-based Nokia has its Global Network Operation Centre for Customers in Asia Pacific Region, Europe, the Middle East and Africa in Chennai.

However, several Indian firms are indigenously developing telecom equipment in India.

The biggest among these is Indus Towers. The second on the list is Tata-backed Tejas Networks. Tejas is working with C-DOT to develop a 4G-5G stack. ITI, HFCL and Black Box are some of the other major telecom equipment companies in India. KNN India