Centre Extends Free Usage Of 5G Test Bed For Recognised Startups Until January 2024

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has extended the free usage of indigenous 5G test bed for recognised startups and MSMEs from January 2023 to January 2024. 

The Ministry of Communication also said that all 5G stakeholders including academia, service providers, R&D institutions, government bodies and equipment manufacturers, among others can also utilise the 5G test bed at a very nominal rate.

“This is being announced in order to encourage usage of the 5G test bed and give a fillip to the development of indigenous technologies/ products in line with ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’ vision. Several startups and companies are already using the test bed for testing their products and services,” MoC said in a statement. 

The ministry informed that the 5G test bed is currently available at IIT Madras, IIT Delhi, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur and IISc Bangalore.

The announcements come weeks after the Indian government shared plans of setting up 100 labs in engineering institutions across the country to develop 5G mobile network applications. The initiative intended to explore opportunities galore, business models and employment potential.

During the Union Budget 2023, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman also said, “The labs will cover, among others, applications such as smart classrooms, precision farming, intelligent transport systems and healthcare applications.”

As of December 2022, Indian telecom players expanded 5G services to 50 towns in the country, as the Union Communications Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said in the Parliament.

Talking about the use cases of the 5G test bed, it is compliant with the global 3GPP and the ORAN standard. It enables research and development teams of Indian academia and industry to validate their products, prototypes, algorithms and showcase various services. 

“The 5G test bed provides complete access for research teams to work on novel concepts holding potential for standardization in India and on the global scale. It provides the facilities of 5G networks for experimenting and demonstrating applications of importance to Indian society and shall help to Indian operators to understand the working of 5G technologies and plan their future networks,” the ministry added. 

In May 2022, PM Narendra Modi launched the indigenous 5G test bed, which enables Indian startups, MSMEs, academia and industry users to test and validate their 5G products. This, in turn, resulted in cost efficiency and reduced design time and also, helped Indian 5G products become competitive across the globe.

In March, 2018, the DoT approved a financial grant of INR 224 Cr to build a 5G test bed. The eight institutes, which collaborated for building indigenous test bed include: IIT Madras, IIT Delhi, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IISc Bangalore, Society for Applied Microwave Electronics Engineering & Research (SAMEER) and Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology (CEWiT). 

As of now, telecom operators–Airtel and Jio are offering 5G services across the country and are also targeting to complete the 5G rollout by December 2023. Meanwhile, Vodafone Idea (Vi) and BSNL will soon be starting their services. 

According to Ericsson’s Mobility Report, India was estimated to have about 31 Mn 5G users by the end of 2022 and numbers were further projected to go up to 690 Mn by 2028.