State-owned BSNL has tied up with Japanese telecom giant NTT and Softbank for technology on 5G and deployment of Internet of Things devices (IoT), the PTI reports. BSNL's managing director Anupam Shrivastava said, "Under the agreement, we will look at solution specially for the smart cities." This agreement seems to be a small part of what BSNL — which hasn't yet started its 4G rollout — is planning with Softbank. As the Economic Times reported in April, the telco is in talks with Softbank and a consortium of other companies to work on OneWeb, a net of satellites that will blanket the earth to provide internet connectivity in under-connected areas. NTT also agreed in February to work with BSNL to create a '5G test bed'. "We are in advance stages of starting 5G field trials. Government is in agreement to provide us 5G spectrum for trials. We expect to start field trials very soon," Shrivastava was quoted as saying at the 5G Congress. Government's 5G push The state-run telco's 5G deals come even as it hasn't rolled out 4G speeds. Its private competitors, meanwhile, are grappling with Jio, which doesn't have any legacy equipment to upgrade. Vodafone–Idea's networks have been largely upgraded to 4G, and so have Airtel's. But while those operators are closer to being able to increment their systems to 5G, they argue that their financial conditions are not suited to this push right now. As telecom operators consolidate, their revenues are narrowing even as data tariffs remain competitive. Last…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...