STL taking leadership in India in building end-to-end 5G technologies

As news started filtering in that the Cabinet has given the green signal for 5G spectrum auctions, vendors are upbeat on the prospects for their respective companies.

Sterlite Technologies (STL) is bullish about the business prospects arising from upcoming 5G deployments. The vendor is taking leadership in India in building end-to-end 5G technologies. In fact, it has partnered with companies like Facebook as part of Evenstar program to build 5G macro radios.

The company has already launched cables and connectivity solutions for enabling 5G globally, and hopes to play a significant role as Indian operators start deploying these new age networks. India would need to double down on its optical fibre infrastructure, ramping up by deployment by almost 4-5 times to ensure robust 5G experience for users.

“So literally starting from our cables, connectivity, looking at our portfolio on the wireless and software, including our entire network deployment, whether it is for deployment of fibre or tomorrow deployment of wireless networks, STL will play as an end to end system integrator,” Ankit Agarwal had said in a recent interview, when asked about the how the company plans to leverage 5G opportunity in India.

STL is also in the process of setting up a 5G lab in Gurgaon to conduct interoperability testing of its made-in-India 5G stack, which it plans to offer to telcos in India and other parts of the world. It will have a completely made in India stack, which the vendor will be taking to the world. Instead of doing testing on the field, STL will do interoperability testing at these labs to ensure that the solution is ready for field deployment. The company has already done interoperability testing with customers in Australia, Taiwan and Europe through third-party labs. It is planning similar testing in India through its own lab.
The system integrator is aiming to get the ecosystem together including chipset, cloud platform, and combination of CU, DU and RU and how all these can become interoperable. It is approaching telecom customers as a consortium with a slew of ecosystem partners. It has onboarded 15 such partners including VMWare, Altistar, Mavenir, Meta’s Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and Microsoft. These are partners for semiconductors, design, manufacturing and testing along with assembly, software and radio partners, and enterprise partners.

CT Bureau