In a major move towards self-reliance in telecom infrastructure, three premier Indian institutions — the Foundation for Science Innovation and Development (FSID) at IISc Bengaluru, the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT) at IIT Delhi, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) — have signed a collaboration agreement to build a production-grade open-source codebase for 5G, 5G-Advanced, and 6G mobile networks.
This initiative, supported by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), expands on the Indian Open-Source Platform for End-to-End 5G Network (IOS-5GN). It now transitions into the Indian Open-Source Platform for Mobile Communication Networks (IOS-MCN) — an academia-industry consortium dedicated to accelerating indigenous telecom innovation.
The IOS-MCN project aims to create a fully open-source mobile network stack aligned with international standards like 3GPP and O-RAN. Strategic partners in the consortium include C-DoT, Tejas Networks, Simnovus, and more than 16 R&D, telecom, startup, and academic partners. A distributed team of over 70 engineers is actively working on the development.
On January 31, 2025, the consortium released IOS-MCN Agartala v0.1.0, featuring:
- Open RAN-compliant radio access network software
- A service orchestration framework
- A tested 5G Core, validated with two indigenous ORAN-compliant radio units developed by VVDN Technologies and Lekha Wireless
The system has achieved downlink speeds of 600–700 Mbps and latency under 10 milliseconds using commercial mobile devices — a significant benchmark.
Leaders from the partner institutions emphasized the strategic importance of this initiative. Balan Gurumoorthy (FSID) highlighted how the partnership bridges academia and industry. Nikhil Agarwal (FITT) called it a crucial step towards cost-effective and globally competitive telecom solutions. Kalai Selvan A (C-DAC) emphasized the project’s role in reducing reliance on proprietary technologies while fostering scalable, resilient mobile infrastructure.
This collaboration not only strengthens India’s position in next-gen telecom but also sets a precedent for future open-source technological ecosystems.