Home-grown HFCL Limited, a telecom equipment manufacturer and technology provider, has launched 5G Macro radio units today at the India Mobile Congress 2022. The first product in HFCL’s 5G family, the 5G 8T8R macro radio units (RU) has been designed and developed completely by the company’s indigenous R&D team to address India and global markets. It is a next-generation RU that has a compact form factor. And HFCL claims that this new RU provides energy efficiency, supports digital beamforming and zero-touch provisioning and will be a key component in rolling out 5G networks. Explaining the relevance of radio units, Mahendra Nahata, MD, HFCL told Business Today that every tower will require six such radio units. In total, for the 5G rollout in Delhi, the city will require 10,000 towers and six radio units will be mounted on each tower. In total, Delhi alone would require 60,000 radio units by a single operator, which in itself is a big opportunity. HFCL is investing around Rs 400 crore in the manufacturing of telecom equipment. And while the radio units will be manufactured in Delhi NCR, Nahata said the company hasn’t yet decided on the number of units it plans to manufacture. However, Nahata counts it as a big opportunity as other than providing radio units to the Indian telecom operators, the company also plans to export it to the world. Other than the radio units, HFCL in collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, HFCL has launched the world’s first Open source Wi-Fi 7 Access Points under its IO product line. HFCL’s Wi-Fi 7 APs will support peak data rates of over 10 Gbps and will offer latency under 2 ms compared to 5 Gbps and 10 ms of current Wi-fi 6 products. Wi-Fi 7 uses faster connections with 320MHz and 4kQAM, multiple connections with multi link operation and Adaptive Connections for adaptive interference puncturing to deliver all enhanced user experience while offering better power efficiency.