Airtel Announces Successful Trial of 5G Private Network at BOSCH Facility

Bharti Airtel on Friday announced the successful trial of 5G private network at Bosch Automotive Electronics India facility in Bengaluru.

Airtel’s on-premise 5G captive private network was built over the trial spectrum allocated by the Department of Telecom (DoT), according to a statement.

Airtel has deployed India’s first private 5G network at BOSCH facility, it said.

“The trial successfully demonstrates Airtel’s capability to deliver high quality private network solutions for Industry 4.0,” it added.

Airtel has implemented two industrial grade use cases for quality improvement and operational efficiency at Bosch’s manufacturing facility, utilising the trial spectrum.

In both the cases, 5G technology such as mobile broadband and ultra-reliable low latency communications drove automated operations ensuring faster scale up and reduced downtimes, the statement said.

“The private network set up on trial spectrum at the Bosch facility has the capability to manage thousands of connected devices along with delivering multi-GBps throughput,” it added.

Meanwhile, a report last month mentioned that the three private telecom operators — Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea — are expected to buy spectrum worth Rs. 71,000 crore in the upcoming 5G auction, leaving a vast majority of the radiowaves going under the hammer unsold, according to research firm IIFL Securities.

According to the report releasedy, the government’s in-principle nod to allocate spectrum directly to enterprises is going to have an adverse outcome of the mega auction.

“While supply is abundant, the government has not cut TRAI’s proposed reserve prices despite telcos’ assertion that these were still high. We see telcos bidding only for four of the 10 bands and spectrum should be sold at base price. We estimate spectrum outlay of Rs. 37,500 crore, Rs. 25,000 crore and Rs. 8,500 crore for Jio, Bharti and Vi,” IIFL said.