India to soon get a telecom manufacturing zone, says Scindia

The government of India is looking at setting up a Telecom Manufacturing Zone, said Jyotiraditya M. Scindia, Minister of Communications and Development of North Eastern Region. Noting that discussions are on with telecom players, he said, “We would like to be a plug-and-play system, where all the basic infrastructure is set up by the Government of India.”

The Minister visited the indigenous first-of-its-kind 5G Testbed Project at Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) and witnessed the demonstration of the indigenous 5G Network at the campus. The researchers from the 5G Testbed Project at IIT-M demonstrated very high speed communications (1 Gbps) using base stations and technology developed indigenously.

Talking to students at the IIT-Madras campus, Mr. Scindia said India has been the fastest executor of the 5G model anywhere in the world. In 22 months, we built a network that has covered 98% of our cities. “Never in the history of telecom has such a rapid paradigm shift taken place in any country, as we have witnessed in India,” he said. He then added, “India has followed the world on 4G. We march with the world on 5G. And India will lead the world in 6G.”

Sharing some statistics, the Minister said that ten years ago, India had only 25 crore internet connections and now it has grown four fold to 97 crore connections. “Ten years ago, we had only 6 crore broadband connections, but today, we have 94 crore broadband connections,” he said.

According to a statement issued by IIT-Madras, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) funded a large-scale 5G testbed project located at IIT Madras and involving eight R&D institutes to encourage Indian start-ups and the industry to take an early lead in 5G. The Testbed is available to industry, academia, research institutions, and government bodies, besides start-ups for various R&D, product development, and capacity-building activities.

Researchers at IIT Madras and the 5G Testbed have developed indigenous 5G systems, and are currently working on designing and developing 6G technologies. The 5G infrastructure (hardware and software) developed at IIT Madras is a state-of-the art system and provides a basis for starts-ups and smaller companies in India to build their 5G products.

Published - September 28, 2024 12:15 am IST