HFCL Limited, a leading telecom and technology provider, on Sunday announced the launch of 5G Lab-as-a-Service. This move from HFCL comes to accelerate the rollout of 5G solutions and services. To go for a cost-effective and faster 5G rollout, the telecom operators are taking the multi-vendor approach based on cloud-native technologies. There is a need to support multiple frequency bands (sub-6 GHz, mmWave), and there will be several use case scenarios of 5G networks when it comes to consumers, enterprises and other industry verticals.
HFCL said that its 5G Lab-as-a-Service provides an automated test environment for the private sector, academia and government to work together on product innovations from concept to reality. To address the needs of the various industry segments, which include things like manufacturing, transportation, retail and healthcare, the 5G lab provides a sandbox for rapid prototyping of 5G use cases. The 5G Lab will help to create pre-integrated and pre-validated 5G solutions for Low Mobility Large Cells needed for the efficient rollout of rural mobile broadband in the country.
Mahendra Nahata, Managing Director at HFCL, said, "Integration of multi-vendor, multi-technology systems is complex, and requires validation and optimisation of disaggregated components such as hardware, software, cloud and network functions for seamless deployment of 5G networks. HFCL’s state-of-art 5G Lab will enable technology providers such as telecom operators, network equipment providers, system integrators, IoT device manufacturers to analyse, integrate and validate performance and capabilities of their products and solutions in a real 5G network environment."
HFCL is offering this 5G Lab-as-a-service (LaaS) to technology providers for:
- Standard compliance and interface testing (3GPP),
- Feature testing including functional, stress and performance testing,
- Proof of concept, pre-deployment and field testing,
- End user devices, network functions, infrastructure and applications testing.
HFCL will provide access to highly skilled teams with expertise in 5G networks and devices, including expertise in DevOps, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and cloud-native technologies that is needed for testing in 5G environments.
