We have recently seen a number of 6G-related news items coming out of India.

The first was a release emerging from a meeting of the “Stakeholders Advisory Committee [SAC] on Telecom Service Providers,” consisting of company heads chaired by the telecom minister Jyotiraditya Scindia. The group set out the aspiration for India to produce 10% of 6G patents and a sixth of contributions to global standards, with a three-year roadmap to get to that point.

The SAC is intended as a tool to simplify dialogue between government and telecoms industry leaders. As can be seen, the aspirations coming principally from the government are significant.

To some degree critics might start waving this kind of statement away, as it’s far from the first time that the Indian government has announced loudly that it’s going to take a major role in 6G and it’s easy to pick holes in something like this.

After all, how are we going to define “6G patents” when the aims and scope of the ITU’s 6G vision are so broad? And how are we going to measure that – after all, China claims to have huge numbers of patents for 5G which the rest of the world doesn’t have visibility into, which makes them functionally irrelevant. Are we only to expect India to provide a sixth of the contributions to standards made from 2027, or overall? Wireless and wireline? Can all these demands be met by trying to dominate in one particular field of expertise, such as throwing huge amounts of work into free-space optical or post-quantum communications, without much affecting the rest of the world?

It doesn’t help that the statement also includes the minister advising telcos to “take all necessary measures to ensure that citizens get good quality telecom services,” which is just about the most generic recommendation possible for telcos.

However, nit-picking aside it underpins the fact that the Indian government is throwing its weight behind a bigger role in 6G than in previous telecoms generations. The relatively young Bharat 6G Alliance has been busy in the past 12 months forming MoUs with organisations in the USA and Europe such as the Next G Alliance, 6G-IA and 6G Flagship even while it constitutes itself, its structure and membership.

TRAIing Harder

Meanwhile, Indian Telecoms Regulator TRAI has recommended a new “Terahertz Experimental Authorisation” [THEA]” to enable experimentation and R&D within the 95 GHz to 3 THz frequency ranges.

This would, according to their press release, “encourage entrepreneurs and academia to develop innovative new technologies and services in the terahertz band.”

This range covers the sub-THz range of frequencies in 100-300 GHz which gained a great deal of attention in 202-2021 as possible 6G candidate frequencies, but also extends a good distance beyond that. The aspiration is to enable experimentation – including the release of experimental products – with the aim of developing expertise and products for indoor and highly localised uses.

In tune with this aim, the plan would be to offer five-year authorisations in these frequency ranges for a nominal cost.

“Upon implementation, the new experimental authorization regime recommended by the Authority will provide a boost to the ‘Make in India’ initiatives of the [Indian] Government,” the press release noted.

TRAI has also recommended opening the 77-81 GHz frequency range for automotive radar systems, which can support services such as obstacle detection, collision warning, and blind spot detection.

The TRAI’s actions here open up India as a potential home for R&D and test and measurement for very high-frequency services – both enabling local innovation and also encouraging inward investment. The pricing and relatively long time-scale gives people the chance to test, iterate and perform much more development as well as the research side of R&D. Given in-country testbeds that could support a variety of start-ups and entrepreneurs and an exchange rate which is generally favourable for inward investment, this could be a very positive step both for home-grown and international experimentation.

Note, too, that this is the same organisation whose approach to 3G licensing and pricing left the country very much behind the curve for rollout of services just ten years ago – Bharti Airtel at the time noted that “The auction format and severe spectrum shortage along with ensuing policy uncertainty drove the prices beyond reasonable levels.” That TRAI is taking such a radically different step today showcases the change within the organisation and its mindset.

This is the kind of concrete action which the country can take to make a significant difference to the market, as we have already seen with its Aadhar and India Stack initiatives, the latter of which now carries over 8 billion payments monthly. While these initiatives are overwhelmingly internal to the country in their effects, we can think about the coordination of a vast and diverse market that these activities required. Having learnt lessons there and started applying them to programmes like Make in India, it’s not surprising that the next stage could have more of an external impact.

6GWorld has previously highlighted the extent of the changes India will need to make to achieve its ambitions; for example, the country didn’t feature in a 2021 study by the Tokyo-based research company Cyber Creative of 6G patent applications by country.

Moreover, according to India’s Economic Survey 2021-2022, Modi’s government spent just 0.7% of its GDP on R&D in 2020 (the most recent year we have data for), compared to 2.4% in China, 2.3% in the EU and over 3% in the USA. Unless things have changed significantly, or R&D spending is becoming highly focussed, this is going to need increasing in order to generate enough useful intellectual property to meet Minister Scindia’s targets.

So this is really a tale of two halves at the moment. While we might cast a cynical eye on the specific objectives coming out of the SAC meeting, it would be unwise not to take the Indian government’s aspirations and capability seriously. They have managed to make big changes to the domestic digital environment already and are primed for more.

Image courtesy of This Is Engineering on Pixabay