How much does it cost to build a private 5G/LTE network in India💰💰

Contrary to what was expected looks like Indian government along with 5G spectrum auction to legacy telco’s is also planning to auction few band of spectrum to enterprise players that wants to build private 5G. This has caused split of opinion between COAI (body of legacy telco folks) and BIF (less popular but has mammoth members like Google and meta)

IMO private cellular is so hot that everyone wants to do something about it, but the ground reality in India is it’s a solution looking for a problem (which is a good thing in few cases), in this post lets quickly see the components that are needed to build a minimum viable private cellular in India.

Cost of a trial deployment:

For the sake of argument I’m going to keep the cost low by using open source components wherever possible and not include voice/sms services (can also be done via opensource btw)since most of the private deployment are going to be for data (either eMBB or IoT), main component of any private network are spectrum, simcard, RAN, core network and server’s (I’m assuming the company already has necessary backhaul and bunch of switches lying around)

Cost to Build a Private LTE/5G network in India

Breakdown of components:

• More info on getting trail spectrum here.
• Sim card can be bought from here. (comes pre burned with imsi and opc/key)
• Core, download magma core or open5gs from github.
• Radio, buy any baicells, accelran or other cheap gnb/enb radio’s.
• COTS server, any DELL or Lenovo desktop or edge servers to run core and other applications like oss/nms/bss.

So there you have it, within 2500$ or 2Lakh Indian rupees you can have a “legal” 5G/LTE network up and running.

If you have not read my post on open source 5G projects, I highly recommend to read it from here, clap and follow for more on 5G and Tech in general.