Government Approves 13 5G Trial Applications With No Chinese Vendors

On Tuesday, the Government approved 13 applications for 5G trials in India. Incidentally, it doesn’t include any Chinese telecom vendors such as Huawei and ZTE, a senior government official said.

No Chinese Vendors at the 5G Party

As reported by ETTelecom, the official listed out the key tie-ups for the testing.

Here is a brief list:

1. BSNL has tied up with C-DoT and Bharti Airtel
2. Vodafone Idea and Reliance Jio tied up with European vendors such as Nokia and Ericsson.

The official also said that the telcos will get to use the 700 MHz band for testing purposes, with some conditions.

Some of the conditions include:

1. Testing use cases in rural as well as urban areas.
2. Paying special attention to security of the network
3. Airwaves are strictly for trial purposes
4. Commercial deployment will be met with serious consequences, as it will breach a clause in the contract.

Notably, this frequency is important for 5G NSA networks. This development hints at the telcos testing Non-Standalone networks at first to expedite 5G rollout in India.

Since December last year, DoT, along with the NCSC, is working on a list of "trusted vendors". In the same vein, the DoT sent a list of “priority vendors” for 5G trials to the telcos.

At that time, the telco listed their partners as follows:

1. Jio named Samsung, Nokia and Ericsson. It also planned to use its own technology.
2. Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea had opted for Nokia and Ericsson.
3. Vodafone Idea had also applied to conduct trials with US-based Mavenir. Mavenir is an OpenRAN technology provider and is engaged in 4G trials based on this technology with the telco in several circles in India.