Telcos, vendors say non-compatible 5Gi to drag India’s next generation network rollout

NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea as well as multinational vendors such as Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, Samsung and NEC want India’s fifth-generation or 5G standards touted as 5Gi should be compatibile to globally-adopted protocols, and adopted optionally since making it mandatory would only drag country’s next-generation technology roadmap.

“Issues relating to interoperability of the proposed (5Gi) specification with the global 3GPP specification still remain. Performance gain of the proposed specification compared to 3GPP specifications have not been established yet,” SP Kochhar, director-general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) told ETTelecom, adding that local standards should be discretionary.