Airtel, Vodafone Idea Push for Early Local 6G Development

Indian telecom companies Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea have said that commencing the development process of local 6G development will help in IP or intellectual property creation for the Indian telecom ecosystem. The telcos talked about the need for the Indian Telecom Industry and Academia to collaborate with the telecom department and contribute towards the 6G standard building in cooperation with 3GPP.

Need for 6G Development

According to a report from ET Telecom, the CTO of Bharti Airtel

has said in a statement that it is just the right time to get into the journey of 6G. He said that India is the brainpower that contributes to R&D. He talked about bringing together telcos, academia and all the brains in the academic institution along with the Indian government for the development of IPR for technologies. He said that building 6G standards is possible in cooperation with 3GPP.

It is to be noted that the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has recently created a 6G technology innovation group which is dedicated to creating a plan of action for Research and Development (R&D) and also for the technology. This innovation group is also a source through which DoT is asking for stakeholders and partners to identify technologies that are under development in India and can become a part of 6G. These will be further pushed for R&D grants.

The CTO of Vodafone Idea, Jagbir Singh also stated that there might be vendors who are already working on 6G so it’s important to begin at the right time. He talked about making a full-fledged vendor system and bringing together the academics’ people, operators and officials from DoT. He said that there should be a separate committee that will submit it into 3GPP and get it patented. He further added that the committee should be representing international 3GPP standards.

Telcos also talked about the importance of getting into 6G early on to avoid the same situations they had to face with 5Gi standards. It is to be noted that a plan of action for the merger of 5Gi into 5G was agreed at 3GPP TSG RAN and particular milestones were set for both 3GPP and TSDSI earlier this month.