HFCL Limited and the United States located chipmaker Qualcomm Technologies have collaborated for bringing out locally designed and developed Wi-Fi 6 products with the former aimed to achieving Rs. 450 crore of annual revenue in the following three years with its Make-In-India for the world strategy in line with the Center’s ambitious Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) campaign.

The Managing Director of HFCL Limited told a renowned media house that they are working with Qualcomm for the development of Wi-Fi 6 products which is next-gen of Wi-Fi and compatible and complementary to 5G networks. He added that the company is aimed towards the increase of the Wi-Fi segment revenue upto three-fold to Rs. 450 crore in the following three years.

In the duration between 2020 and 21, the Delhi-based company’s income from the Wi-Fi portfolio stood at Rs. 150 crore.

The connectivity range of the Wi-Fi 6 will be 50 percent higher than its predecessor, and requires fewer access points that deliver better performance.

In the previous December, the Cabinet had cleared the installation of the public Wi-Fi networks which according to the telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad would unleash the broadband revolution in India and empower the lives of ordinary citizen.

The center aims for deployment of 2 million public Wi-Fi access points by the end of 2021, as said by the telecom secretary Anshu Prakash.

In 2018, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had given free spectrum in the 5 GHz frequency for public Wi-Fi services, and the entities could utilize frequencies in the 5150-5250 MHz, 5250-5350 MHz and 5725-5875 MHz without any license. This was first opposed by the incumbent telecom operators.

The native company in India is expecting massive orders from the private and public telecom carriers and enterprise customers following their fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) strategy and upcoming next generation of networks.

The dual band indoor and outdoor access points would be developed within the country while the other dual band home-mesh routers and other variants are in the pipeline for this year.

A topmost executive said, “When the next generation of technology comes, the commercial and enterprise networks will need high throughput that will be achieved either on indoor small cells or Wi-Fi 6. So this Wi-Fi 6 wil have a huge demand for 5G applications and even now wherever high data throughput is required.”

HFCL will market the co-developed products in the country wide regions after the necessary trials under its IO brand.

In 2020, the company shipped 100,00 units of 100 percent indigenous carrier-grade Wi-Fi systems within a record time.

Nahata said, “It is a tectonic displacement in terms of technology as the data allover would be two to eight times higher, and a 75 percent lower latency could be achieved while being even more power efficient when placed aside to predessars or a Wi-Fi 5 product.”

The Vice President of Qualcomm Global and President of Qualcomm India Private Limited, Rajen Vagadia, said, “Wi-Fi 6 is a transformational re-imagination of how Wi-Fi works as it is designed to accommodate the ever-growing number of connected devices. The Qualcomm Networking Pro Series platforms raise the bar for managing the surge in connected devices, handling the variation and complexity of those devices, data needs and improving the quality of the overall connectivity experiences they deliver, all with increased security.”

On basis of Qualcomm’s networking platform, the IO products are designed to deliver highly efficient connectivity in complex surroundings at the same time ensuring data transfer security.

Vagadia also added that the US company is happy to collaborate with HFCL for the development of their Wi-Fi 6 portfolio of products and said, “We look forward to bringing the benefits of latest technology, greater capacity and network efficiencies of Wi-Fi 6 to HFCL’s customers and end users across India and the world.”

Wi-Fi Alliance calculates that the worldwide economic value of Wi-Fi would reach $3.3 trillion in 2021, and projects it would reach $4.9 trillion by 2025.

A few years ago, in 2017, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had recommended a model in which public Wi-Fi aggregators or village-level entrepreneurs would start public data offices (PDO) for driving mass Wi-Fi network distribution.