C-DOT emerges as govt's biggest bet for India's ongoing 5G rollout

The body's latest achievement is designing a fully indigenous non-standalone 5G core in record time

After decades of relative obscurity as an autonomous body of the Department of Telecommunications, the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) has emerged as the government’s biggest bet for India’s ongoing 5G rollout. 

C-DOT has been in the news for creating a full stack of sophisticated 5G equipment completely indigenously and at a fraction of the budget of global competitors such as Huawei, in less than two years. The Centre is now getting special support from the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). Officials say that the Department of Space, the home ministry and other key ministries plan to leverage its capabilities on artificial intelligence, cyber security, optical fibre, machine-to-machine communication, and even reconnaissance.

C-DOT has been in the limelight earlier as well. Established in 1984 by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his close associate, India’s telecom czar, Sam Pitroda, the centre is considered to be the progenitor of India’s telecom revolution. In the mid-80s, the country had 2 million telephones for approximately 800 million people and the fledgling telecom industry was predominantly owned by the government. As of August 2022, India had 1.17 billion telecom connections, of which 98 per cent were mobile phone connections, and an estimated 65 per cent were smartphones, according to government and industry figures. This phenomenal rise over the past three decades in an economically distressed nation is credited to C-DOT, whose research has focused on the design and production of ‘Made in India’ telecom technology suited to the Indian landscape. From its early success in setting up reliable telecom infrastructure that allowed public call offices or PCOs to mushroom nationwide, and the establishment of digital exchanges, to the creation of network infrastructure supporting successive waves of 2G, 3G and 4G rollouts, C-DOT has been a key part of India’s telecom story.

However, it has not always been smooth sailing. Back in 1990, the centre and its then boss, Sam Pitroda, had been in the middle of a major scandal over allegations that the latter had used the body to enhance the business interests of his companies in the US. Charges of recruiting favourites to crucial posts, and of furnishing false progress reports about C-DoT, had led to a political slugfest and the sacking of several of its officials. 

Eyes on 5G

C-DOT’s latest achievement is designing a fully indigenous non-standalone (NSA) 5G core in record time. Operating on an annual budget of Rs 400 crore, which pays for the 40-plus projects it is currently running, the centre has delivered the NSA core with 200 researchers, C-DOT executive director, Rajkumar Upadhyay, told Business Standard. 

Upadhyay says that the government body held its own among global and domestic telecom firms at the prestigious India Mobile Congress 2022, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi used C-DOT’s NSA core to make video calls to primary health centres in remote villages of Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.

Now up and running, the NSA core has been installed at the state-owned telecom company, BSNL’s premises in Chandigarh, he says.  The 5G core is the heart of a 5G mobile network, establishing reliable, secure connectivity to the network for end-users and providing access to its services. The core domain handles a wide variety of essential functions in the mobile network, such as connectivity and mobility management, authentication and authorisation, subscriber data management and policy management, among others. 

“Our 4G and 5G NSA cores are fully hardware independent. Effectively, there is no vendor lock-in. It can be tailored to suit the specifications of both PCs and servers,” Upadhyay explains. This is important for the local industry since global equipment makers such as Nokia and Ericsson have till now dictated hardware prices and supply. 

While the government has incrementally increased C-DOT’s responsibilities over the past decade, the 5G race has cemented its status as an apex national research institution. “Our work on 5G began just after telecom minister Ashwini Vaishnaw took charge (in July 2021). He asked us to use all the resources at our disposal and assured all help,” Upadhyay says. He stresses that the next step will be the development of India’s first-ever indigenously built standalone (SA) 5G core, considered to be a technological improvement on the NSA core, by October, 2023. While the NSA core technology leverages existing networking infrastructure, the SA core modernises network infrastructure to suit the myriad needs of enterprise. 

The SA core will be necessary for achieving optimal capability in many of the classic use-cases of 5G that have been showcased by both the government and industry. A long list of high-tech applications, ranging from robotics, advanced manufacturing and remote surgery, to advanced retail and logistics operations, requires ultra low latency, which only an SA core can provide.

Network latency is the time required for a set of data to travel between two points. 5G technology is different from previous generations of cellular technology because of how short that time will be. Hence, its potential use-cases are the largest.  C-DOT is also set to launch the first domestically developed 5G radio and antennas in the next six months, along with the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN). RAN allows the disaggregation of network equipment components, enabling a telecom company to source hardware and software from different vendors for network building. While the 5G radio will be ‘telco grade’ by March 2023, a network launch can be made by June 2023, the centre says.

But in a break with the past, C-DOT is ditching its erstwhile ‘aatmanirbharta’ in favour of leveraging domestic corporate sector expertise to deliver its increasingly complex projects. For instance, homegrown telecom equipment maker, VVDN Technologies, and IIT Hyderabad-incubated startup, WiSig Networks, is working with the C-DOT for the RAN.

“While a decision is yet to be taken on the matter, we are thinking of working with a partner for the SA 5G core. India offers some of the best companies, across verticals, which are working on creating cutting-edge telecom technology. It’s a waste not to use them,” Upadhyay says.

Under its 5G alliances program, C-DOT has set up 10 consortiums to deliver a complete suite of 5G products by 2024. The focus on domestic companies from across the value chain also helps in quickly identifying export opportunities for India’s telecom tech, which is a key ask from the PMO.

Challenges remain

Commercialising the newly developed technologies remains the bigger challenge, Upadhyay says. “The telecom companies want backward compatibility of all new tech since they have to roll it out to existing customers who want to access the same as soon as possible. As a result, a significant amount of customisation is required,” Upadhyay says.

However, while private telcos have appreciated the professionalism and speed of a government research institution, C-DOT’s longtime partner BSNL has often proved to be a problem, a senior Telecom Department official on the governing council of C-DOT says. Media reports in October suggested that BSNL was unhappy with a C-DOT-Tata Group consortium currently working to provide the state-run telco with 5G equipment because of the higher costs cited. Yet to upgrade over 1 lakh towers to 4G, BSNL has missed its deadlines — which are now January 2023 for 4G and August 2023 for 5G.

Again, though C-DOTs budget has swiftly risen — from Rs 323 crore in FY21 to Rs 500 crore in FY23 (2022-23) — it has struggled to hire the required number of researchers. “It is very difficult to source good talent. IIT graduates give us a miss. As is our mandate, we have consistently hired from NITs, but still attrition occurs,” another official says, blaming it on the lure of the higher financial benefits of a corporate sector job. Officials say that up to 95 per cent of the current staff on C-DOT’s roster are classified as technical, which means that the centre is operating with minimum bureaucratic fat. But this also means that researchers often have to get into administrative roles, which drains their time. 

To attract and retain more people, the sprawling C-DOT campus in South Delhi’s leafy Mehrauli area has been spruced up to feel like a tech campus rather than a government office. 

Upadhyay believes that the government has much bigger plans for the centre in the days to come.