The homegrown 5G standard, 5Gi, developed by the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) under the aegis of the Telecommunications Standards Development Society India (TSDSI), has become an issue of contention between India’s top two telcos Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel.

To begin with, Airtel has strictly opposed 5Gi arguing that the homegrown 5G standard will increase the costs of network and mobile devices, and will “seriously impact” the interoperability between networks based on two different network technologies.

The Sunil Mittal-led telco, thus, only wants the global standard of 3GPP to be implemented for the 5G network.

Rival Jio, on the other hand, stated it supports any indigenous technology if it does not compromise on the network quality and increase costs.

As a consequence, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has directed the representative body of telcos - the Cellular Operators Association of India (COA) - to make a presentation outlining the pros and cons of the controversial 5Gi standard.

The COAI has also been directed to assess the acceptability of the Indian standard by telcos as well as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), the report stated.

COAI represents all three private telcos - Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea.