New Delhi, Feb 20 (IANS): The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) held a preliminary meeting on trials of 5G spectrum on Thursday with telecom service providers and their telecom equipment vendors to get a status update on their preparedness and what they expect from the department.

The meeting was chaired by DoT's Member (technology) and Airtel, Vodafone Idea, Reliance Jio, and BSNL made their technical presentations. Each operator was accompanied by with their vendors like Airtel and Vodafone Idea with Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, and ZTE, Reliance Jio with Samsung, the BSNL with ZTE.

"The telecom companies made presentations along with their OEM partners on how the networks will be run, user cases will be made... exchange and routing of calls and impact on the realtime networks. This is not a stage of any decision and there will be more meetings," an official source said.

Any field trial in respect of 5G is to be carried out only through licensed telecom service providers in a restrictive, limited geographical area and for specific use case, said the sources.

Doing field trials in 5G is a pre-requisitive as 5G spectrum related services will be launched for the first time in India as and when they are started. The field trials are similar to testing the technology with specific equipment along with 5G spectrum.

In June 2019, the DoT approved a one-year 5G trial period and a one-time fee of Rs 5,000 for entities seeking experimental spectrum to conduct trials. The government also announced its intention to focus on three big social sectors -- education, agriculture and healthcare -- for deployment of 5G.