Indigenous 5G Test Bed

The Centre has decided to offer the use of Indigenous 5G Test Bed free of cost to the Government recognised start-ups and MSMEs for the next six months upto January 2023.

Details –

• The decision has been taken with an objective to boost 5G ecosystem within India and to achieve the objectives of Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Make in India initiatives.
• The facility is available at a very nominal rate to all other stakeholders.
• Department of Telecommunications has urged all 5G stakeholders including industry, academia, service providers, government bodies and equipment manufacturers to utilise the 5G testbed facilities and expertise to test and facilitate the speedy development and deployment of their products in the network.
• Keeping in view India’s specific requirements and to take lead in 5G deployment, Department of Telecommunications has approved financial grant for the multi-institute collaborative project to set up ‘Indigenous 5G Test Bed’ in India in March, 2018 with total cost of 224 crore rupees.

Indigenous 5Gi technology –

• The Telecom Service Providers were encouraged to conduct trials using 5Gi technology in addition to the already known 5G Technology.
• It will be recalled that International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has also approved the 5Gi technology, which was advocated by India, as it facilitates much larger reach of the 5G towers and Radio networks.
• The 5Gi technology has been developed by IIT Madras, Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology (CEWiT) and IIT Hyderabad.

What is 5G technology?

• 5G networks use OFDM encoding, with the air interface designed for much lower latency and greater flexibility than LTE or the 4G technology.
• 5G will have data transfer speeds of up to 100 gb/sec; latency of only 1 ms – much lower than 4G, and will enable a video film to be downloaded in 1 sec.
• It will support more connections on a broad range of frequencies 300 MHz-90 GHz, and a million devices per sq kilometre.
• While most 4G channels are 20 MHz, 5G channels can be up to 400MHz.
• Data will move 100 times faster; it will handle far more data, with far lower lag times.
• It is about machine-to-machine communications, with billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices connected – from washing machines to self-driving cars to entire smart cities.

Why does 5G matter?

• Digital economies will ride on these platforms – routers, switches, base stations, smartphones, towers, cloud data centres.
• 5G is an investment for the next decade. This infrastructure will transform society, industry, automation and be the backbone for digital economies throughout the world.