The Indian government said it expected the first commercial 6G services in the country to be launched around 2030
Keysight Technologies announced it has signed a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM) that extends their existing relationship beyond 5G design and testing into research on future 6G systems.
In August 2020, Keysight signed an MoU with IITM to support Telecom Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI) in the development of India-specific 5G standards with the aim of encouraging Indian startups and the telecom industry to take an early lead in 5G.
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) funded the large-scale project called “5G Testbed” with the goal of building a testbed that closely resembled a real-world 5G deployment, using equipment developed by Keysight.
The new MoU extends the existing agreement to enable Keysight and IITM to continue working together in areas of mutual interest with a focus on technical development and India’s plan to launch as-yet-unstandardized 6G services by 2030.
“India has already paved the way for rapid expansion of technology in manufacturing, infrastructure, education, agriculture, and healthcare with the successful multi-band 5G auctions and is now positioned to be one of the top global markets for 5G,” said Sudhir Tangri, VP and GM of Keysight India. “As a founding member of the 6G Flagship Program, we are pleased to extend our current 5G partnership with IITM into new groundbreaking 6G research to contribute to India’s forward-looking 6G plans.”
“IIT Madras has been working on various 5G technologies and demonstrated indigenous end-to-end 5G system partnering with other institutions. Keysight test equipment has been instrumental to the development of the system and Keysight has provided invaluable support in solving some of the technical problems,” said Bhaskar Ramamurthi, professor at IIT Madras. “With the advent of 6G, IIT Madras plans to take the next steps in strengthening its collaboration with Keysight. This MoU provides a framework for working together on the next-generation beyond-5G and 6G technologies.”
In February, Keysight Technologies had signed a MoU with Samsung Research to advance research and development of 6G technology.
Keysight has said that future 6G systems are expected to be built on technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), sensing, digital twins, time-sensitive networking (TSN) and holographic communications. Under the terms of the agreement with Samsung Research, the two companies will work together to develop test and verification technologies for 6G wireless systems.
Keysight also noted that the collaboration will accelerate the development of AI-enabled air interfaces that leverage massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna technology. Such air interfaces support deployment of energy-efficient and ultra-dense networks capable of delivering ultra-low latencies and terabit data wireless transmissions.
Keysight Technologies also said it helped Korean company LG Electronics to demonstrate a 6G radio frequency (RF) front-end (RFFE) module at the 2021 Korea Science and Technology Exhibition held at the Korea International Exhibition Center (KINTEX) in Ilsan, Korea in December 2021.
This demonstration leveraged Keysight’s 6G sub-terahertz (THz) R&D testbed and LG’s 6G radio front-end transceiver to generate terabit data wireless transmissions.