The Chronicles of 5G deployment in India : News and Updates
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Ericsson scaling up Pune manufacturing facility to meet India 5G gear requirement: India head - ET Telecom
Ericsson 5G: "We are scaling up production capability in Pune with Jabil. We would like to hit the target of meeting close to 100% requirement in India from India," Nitin Bansal, head of Ericsson India and head of Network Solutions, Southeast Asia, Oceania and India, told ET. “We have done that...
They have decided to do enterprise/industrial 5G on their own O-RAN tech & use Samsung's tech for civil end users like you & me.
It seems they will eventually switch to a completely in-house developed O-RAN based 5G, but they aren't willing to sit around until their tech is fully ready. The telecom sector does provide for early mover advantage & given the fierce competition in the Indian market one can understand why they are doing this. It is estimated that the civil users in India will adopt 5G far quicker than industries. But the industries are where the value is.
Jio seems to have gathered up some semi-conductor expertise too by virtue of their recent acquisitions of some American & European companies. These companies are semi-conductor design firms with expertise in RF/Analogue signal chips & some low powered digital chips. Jio is also poaching up Indian semi-conductor design engineers from the likes of INTEL, NVIDIA etc. in cities like Bangalore & Hyderabad.
Jio plans on getting their customized chips from Qualcomm & COTS chips from INTEL. Samsung is lobbying hard to sell their customized chips to Jio. Jio have also held some exploratory talks with the Indian companies (Vedanta Group, if I recall correctly) that are getting into semi-conductor fabs. Recently the CEO if Qualcomm announced that they have no issues sourcing chips from India when these upcoming fabs start production.
Meanwhile the govt. is pushing the big business houses to get into semi-conductor & display fabs. Ambani is obviously in that "big business houses" list. On the other hand, some analysts are saying that Jio has burned quite a bit of cash on 5G spectrum allocation bidding and thus won't be getting into another cash guzzling business like fabs. The parent company also has some big plans in the green hydrogen, energy storage etc. sectors. All of this will require huge amounts of money. So Jio will continue importing semi-conductors. At best they will buy up shares of some upcoming fab & be a minority stakeholder.
It's all hazy at the moment. Hopefully some clarity will emerge soon. I haven't been able to closely follow this topic for some time now. Maybe I have missed a few things.
Jio Platforms, the digital arm of Reliance Industries Ltd, will buy communications equipment maker Mimosa Networks for USD 60 million as it looks to bolster its 5G telecom and broadband services.
www.thehindu.com
Jio buys U.S.-based Mimosa Networks for $60 mn
The deal comes at a time when countries across the world are looking to move away from Chinese technology
Ericsson has increased India investments to manufacture 5G gear: MD
The Swedish giant has increased investments in India to manufacture 5G radio equipment as it looks to help Indian telcos deploy networks.
Neighbouring countries, allies to get access to India's 5G testbed
"More discussions on the proposal will be soon held. Other nations will be asked to apply for the same," an official said
Tejas Networks gets key 5G tech from IIT-Madras
Tejas Networks getting into the manufacture of RAN is a significant step in the indigenisation of telecommunications equipment
Tejas Networks has acquired the technology for producing Radio Access Network (RAN) – the heart of 5G communications – from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, for ₹12 crore. This is a non-exclusive technology transfer. The Tata Group company is expected to be able to sell RAN to telecom companies in a year.
RAN is a piece of equipment that every 5G telecom tower will need to have. There are over 200,000 5G sites in India. (The 2,00,000th site was launched at Gangotri in May 2023.)
Though the technology arose out of the 5G test bed housed in IIT Madras, it was developed by the IITs of Madras and Kanpur and the Society for Applied Microwave Electronics Engineering and Research (SAMEER), a research institution under the Ministry of Electronics and IT.
Tejas Networks getting into the manufacture of RAN is a significant step in the indigenisation of telecommunications equipment, of which there are just a handful in the world—the likes of Huawei, ZTE, and Ericsson. In recent years, buying equipment from abroad has been seen as something fraught with security risk. With RAN under its belt, Tejas joins the elite club of 5G telecom equipment manufacturers.
At a press conference at IIT Madras today, it was said that the technology transferred was at a ‘technology readiness level (TRL)’ 8. From here to TRL-10 – full commercialisation – Tejas would have to do a lot of work including testing.
5G test bed
On May 17, 2022, Prime Minister Modi dedicated the ‘5G test bed’ to the nation. The test bed is distributed over five locations – IITs of Madras, Kanpur, Delhi, and Hyderabad, and the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. A government press release described the test bed as “a crucial step towards 5G Aatmanirbhar Bharat’ and said that Indian academia and industry could use the Indigenous 5G Test Bed “to validate products, prototypes, algorithms, and services.”Though the test bed itself is a year old, work on 5G technologies had started earlier. Dr Radhakrishna Ganti of the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras, and the Principal Investigator from IIT Madras told businessline that RAN was a product of five years of work of 200 scientists.
Dr Kamakoti Veezhinathan, Director, IIT Madras, disagreed that the technology may have been undersold, noting that Tejas would have further work to do, and the idea was also to help develop an Indian telecom equipment manufacturing industry.
For the quarter ended September 2023, Tejas Networks reported a turnover of ₹377 crore and a net loss of ₹12 crore.
What're the security implications of such a move ? Arguably not everyone is looking out for high speed internet for they come at a high cost but the undesirable elements certainly find a way to come up with funds to abuse this facility ?
Does merely storing data within servers in India solve the problem or is there much more to it ?
Finally what would it take for an Indian company viz the Mittals or our very own Mukesbhai to take Musk on at least in our geography ?
From the little I understand only the Chinese seem in a position to counter Starlink & should have their entire network ready in a few years & to a certain extent the British venture in which Airtel has some stake .
What're the security implications of the Chinese venture on India for I understand that you don't need any ground based receivers to be based in the home country in order to receive signals especially since we've also no good western neighbour not that China's any less of a threat nowadays ?
@Gautam ; @Milspec et al who've some insight into this