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NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel<\/a> and Vodafone Idea<\/a> said that an early start into local 6G development will result in IP or intellectual property creation for the Indian telecom ecosystem. They said that there is a need for the Indian telecom industry<\/a> and academia to join forces with the telecom department and contribute towards the 6G standard building in cooperation with 3GPP.
“...getting into the journey of 6G is absolutely the right time. India has the brainpower which contributes to the R&D. We should bring telcos, the academia, all the brain we have in our very high standard academic institutions and the Indian government together for the development of IPR for technologies…we can actually really start building 6G standards, and in these 6G standards, we cooperate with 3GPP,” Randeep Sekhon, CTO of Bharti AIrtel<\/a> told ET.
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) recently formed a 6G technology<\/a> innovation group to create a roadmap for research and development (R&D) and also an action plan for the technology.
The DoT through its innovation group is inviting various stakeholders and partners to help find out technologies that are under development in India and can form a part of 6G so that the same can be pushed for R&D grants.
“I am sure some vendors must be already working on the 6G. So we should start working at the right time. But as I said, let’s identify those members, let’s make a full-fledged vendor ecosystem, the academics people, operators and officials from DoT, and let’s have this separate committee which will submit into 3GPP and getting it patented…this committee should be representing into the international 3GPP standards,” Jagbir Singh, CTO of Vodafone Idea<\/a> told ET.
Telcos said that starting early for 6G will help India avoid the situation which the telecom department faced with the 5G<\/a>i standard. The standard is now being merged with 3GPP’s global 5G<\/a> standard following opposition from telcos, chipset and device makers, and gear vendors.