Govt. mulls 5G test bed roll-out in early January

‘SMEs, industries can trial solutions’

The government is planning to roll out a 5G test bed in early January to enable small and medium enterprises and other industry players to test their solutions on a working platform, a top Department of Telecom official said on Thursday.

To promote 5G indigenous technology, DoT had in March 2018 approved a multi-institute collaborative project to set up a 5G Test Bed at a total cost of ₹224 crore. A test bed consists of a specific environment including hardware, software, operating system and network configuration to test a product or service.

“One more effort that we have taken in the recent past is setting up a 5G test bed. We hope to roll out this 5G test bed in early January which will enable SMEs and other parts of industries to come and test their solution on a working platform,” DoT Secretary K. Rajaraman said at the India Mobile Congress. At present, the DoT has allocated spectrum to Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea and MTNL for 5G trials.