12 big telcos enquired about telecom stack: Vaishnaw
The government has received enquiries from 12 large telecom service providers from across the world for India’s telecom stack, Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Thursday.
He said the government's Telecom Technology Development Fund (TTDF) would be slowly enlarged to ~3,000-4,000 crore over a number of years, from the current ~500 crore per year.
The Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) under the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) is in the process of developing a full stack of sophisticated telecom equipment fully indigenously. This includes designing a fully indigenous nonstandalone (NSA) 5G core.
It is also creating India’s firstever indigenously built standalone (SA) 5G core, considered to be a technological improvement on the NSA core, by October, 2023. The first domestically developed 5G radio and antennas would also be ready in the next six months, along with the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), C-DOT officials had earlier said. Vaishnaw said India was trying to test the technology for 10 million simultaneous connections. The entire technology stack would soon be deployed by state owned telecom operator BSNL as part of its plans to roll out 4G services in early 2023. The Centre remains bullish on BSNL’S prospects. “BSNL has about 135,000 towers across the country, and especially in rural areas still unserviced by the three private telecom service providers. The 4G stack will be rolled out nationwide, and used by this major infrastructure network,” he said.
Draft Digital India Bill for consultation by month-end
After the draft data protection bill, the government is now all set to bring another key legislation — Digital India Bill — that will be made available for public consultation by the month-end, Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.
‘Railways to go big on small cargo, capture road freight’
Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the national transporter would “go big” on lessthan-truckload (LTL) cargo, and the industry would be able to see the difference really soon. LTL refers to freight items that generally elude the railways because of its infrastructure being built around the transportation of large items or bulk raw materials.