India's first 5G technology trials for rural broadband began on Thursday at Ajol village in Gujarat with a base transceiver station (BTS) installed 17km away at Unava town in the Gandhinagar district.A team of representatives from the department of telecom (DoT) and two private mobile service providers visited the village to measure speeds, recording a 105.47 Mbps download speed and a 58.77 Mbps upload speed.Among the technologies being tested are 360 degrees virtual reality content playback, a virtual-reality connected classroom, 5G immersive gaming and artificial intelligence assisted 360 degrees cameras with real-time video streams, said senior DoT officials.On Thursday, the Gujarat DoT LSA team comprising DDGs Ajatshatru Somani, Roshan Lal Meena, directors Sumit Mishra and Vikas Dadhich, along with technical teams of Vodafone Idea Limited (VIL) and Nokia, visited the 5G testing sites of Gandhinagar.On November 19, the DoT team checked speeds at the Mahatma Mandir 5G site in Gandhinagar city, which was found to be about 1.5 Gbps, about 100 times faster than 4G.Bharti Airtel hosted the 'O-RAN Alliance Global PlugFest 2021' in India in partnership with global and Indian technology companies, a release said on ThursdayPut simply, Open RAN or open radio access network architecture is industry terminology for interoperability and standardisation of radio access network elements including products and software from various vendors.The Global PlugFest offers a platform to the global O-RAN community to integrate and test solutions, including 5G and 4G."This year's edition saw wider participation from members of the global O-RAN community. Airtel was joined by AMI, ASOCS, Capgemini Engineering, Cisco, Intel, IP Infusion, Keysight Technologies, Mavenir, Sercomm, STL, TCS, VIAVI Solutions, VMware and VVDN," Airtel release said.This was the second O-RAN Alliance Global PlugFest hosted in India by Airtel, the release said and added that this year's edition saw wider participation from members of the global O-RAN community.Commenting on the development, Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel said, “The enthusiastic response to the event underscores the growing maturity of O-RAN and the global conviction towards this movement".The learnings will further accelerate the journey to 'Make in India' O-RAN based 5G solutions that can be deployed widely across India and the rest of the world, Sekhon added.Airtel has been a board member since the beginning of O-RAN Alliance, which now associates a global community of over 300 telecom operators, vendors and research and academic institutions working to develop a sustainable open RAN ecosystem.READ MORE ONA rare bonhomie among three private telecom companies in raising tariffs coming on the back of a bailout package by the government may have helped the telecom sector avert a crisis but the challenges haven't ceased to exist as the industry faces a cash-guzzling task of rolling out 5G networks in the coming months.The sector that provides direct and indirect employment to millions is projected to see Rs 1.3 lakh crore to Rs 2.3 lakh crore of investments in the coming years in creating robust infrastructure and building telecom and network products that have been incentivised by the government through PLI and other initiatives.
Where India’s first rural 5G technology trial starts at Gujarat's Ajol village
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