With an objective to boost the 5G ecosystem within India and to achieve the objectives of Aatmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) initiatives, the government has decided to offer the use of indigenous 5G testbeds free of cost to the government-recognized startups and medium and small  firms.

The offer is valid for the next six months till January 2023 and would be made available at a very nominal rate to other stakeholders too, according to an official statement.

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has urged all 5G stakeholders — the industry, academia, service providers, R&D institutions, government bodies, equipment manufacturers etc. — 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, the DoT 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 Rs.224 crore.  The eight collaborating institutes in the project are IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Madras, IIT Delhi, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IISc Bangalore, Society for Applied Microwave Electronics Engineering & Research and Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology.

The 5G testbeds are available at five locations, including in IIT Madras, IIT Delhi, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur and IISc Bangalore.

The end-to-end testbed is compliant with the global 3GPP standard and the ORAN standard.  Indigenous 5G testbed provides an open 5G test bed that enables R&D teams to validate their products, prototypes, algorithms and demonstrate various services.