‘Multiple Indian companies working on 5G technology’

This is the best time for the country to develop its own 5G technology, says Anand Agarwal, Group CEO, STL, a digital networks integrator company. The whole ecosystem for 5G is becoming completely open and a few telecom operators around the world are moving towards fully open Radio Access Network (RAN) ecosystem for 5G deployment instead of depending on closed ecosystem of few companies and their proprietary products, Agarwal said.

“The wireless ecosystem has become open for multiple companies instead of the three of four companies,” says Agarwal. There are many companies in the country working on this STL would be collaborating with them to build the 5G ecosystem, says Agarwal.

STL has already started working with IIT-Chennai, Saankhya Labs of Bengaluru, VVDN Technologies in Gurgaon and has collaborated with them for launching products.

According to Agarwal, 5G has a strong software component and this is India’s strength. Moreover, the country was already developing these technologies for global companies and now they can direct that capabilities for making that in India.

“For India, it is a right time to take the leap and especially as the world is looking for alternatives to China,” says Agarwal. Timing wise, it is the best time for India, he adds. There must be a degree of your own development and this is a great opportunity to develop our own 5G ecosystem, so intent-wise and action-wise this is the right direction, he added.

5G technology is more about software, hardware, RAN, cloud and integrators. And, like it happened in the computing industry, and the hardware and software is getting separated with software moving to the could, he explains. So telecom service operators can now buy these off the shelf. There is also a 30% reduction in capex and 30% in opex so it results in lots of savings by using open RAN, he adds.

“STL has been working on the wireless ecosystem for last three years. With some customers, we are in their labs at a global level as well as India and we will be soon moving to field trials in the first half of 2021 with commercial deployment towards later half of 2021,” Agarwal said.

STL has acquired companies and also organically investing and all that coming to fruition and has all the capabilities now and also nobody has end to end capability and STL is trying to acquire that, he said.

Greenfield projects are going for 100% open RAN, while brownfield projects are going in for a mix and match. Dish Network is going full open RAN in the US and STL has worked with them. STL released the 5G multi-band macro radio solution along with Dish Networks for the 5G networks.

Parag Naik, co-founder and CEO, Saankhya Labs, said developing India’s capabilities in the 5G telecom space is vital as it is poised to be a leader in 5G technology.

Saankhya Labs has been developing open RAN based cognitive scalable 5G RAN solutions which includes multi-band remote radio units.

Saankhya Labs has developed 5G broadcast solution that is based on the convergence of broadcast and broadband for delivering high quality video and other broadcast content cost effectively to the end consumer, Naik, said.

As operators around the world accelerate 5G network deployment, new radio solutions will need to expedite affordable implementation and Indian companies could provide solutions to enable operators to address multiple deployment use cases with a faster time to market.