NEW DELHI: Sterlite Technologies Limited (STL) said that it is open to fund startups to develop “niche capabilities” for its 5G stack, which it plans to offer to telcos in India and other parts of the world.

STL previously made an investment in Israeli startup ASOCS, a developer of open and virtualized 4G and 5G Radio Access Network (vRAN) solutions.

“We are open to similar investment opportunities in India to strengthen niche capabilities. Startups are coming up in niche areas. We get approached from time to time and the intent is to utilise technologies for customers…it either could be a strategic partnership of investment,” Ankit Agarwal, managing director at STL told ET.

STL is also in the process of setting up a 5G lab in Gurgaon to conduct interoperability testing of its made-in-India 5G stack, which it plans to offer to telcos in India and other parts of the world.

“We are setting up our own 5G lab, which we will launch in coming months in Gurgaon. It will have a completely made in India stack, which we will be taking to the world. Instead of doing testing on the field, we will do interoperability testing at these labs to ensure that our solution is ready for field deployment and customers can enjoy the benefit,” he added.

The company has already done similar interoperability testing with customers in Australia, Taiwan and Europe through third-party labs. It is planning similar testing in India through its own lab.

“We are aiming to get the ecosystem together including chipset, cloud platform, and combination of CU, DU and RU and how all these can become interoperable, which is extremely important…interoperability is a big part of work going on for us,” he added.

The homebred vendor said that it is now approaching telecom customers as a consortium with a slew of ecosystem partners. It has onboarded 15 such partners including VMWare, Altistar, Mavenir, Meta’s Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and Microsoft.

“We have partners for semiconductors, design, manufacturing and testing along with assembly,..we have software and radio partners. We also have enterprise partners,” he added.