Bhubaneswar: Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan Deemed to be University (SOA) here has been chosen as one of the 100 institutions in India to be awarded a 5G Laboratory by the Ministry of Telecommunications.
Prime Minister, Narendra Modi digitally awarded the 5G Labs to the 100 institutions at the Indian Mobile Congress-2023 which was inaugurated by him at New Delhi on Friday.
The 5G Labs are meant for students and start-up communities and empower the higher education institutions to meet India’s unique needs and make the Indian academia and start-up ecosystem 6G ready.
With this award of a 5G Lab, SOA has been connected with the global digital ecosystem. SOA was ranked 15th in the university category in the country by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), Ministry of Education, in 2023.
The 5G Lab initiative has been aimed at building competencies and engagement in 5G and beyond technologies involving students and the academic fraternity. It would also encourage academia-industry engagement to ideate and develop India specific 5G use cases for rural and remote areas.
5G Labs, intended to create deep-tech talent at the grass root level, will allow researchers to experiment with network configuration, protocols and algorithms to enhance network reliability, speed and efficiency.
Prof. Pradipta Kumar Nanda, SOA Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Manas Kumar Mallick, Director, Institute of Technical Education and Research (ITER), SOA’s faculty of engineering, Prof. Renu Sharma, Additional Dean (Student Affairs), ITER, Dr. Bharat Jyoti Sahu, Associate Professor and Dr. Satish Samal, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, and Mr. Siddhartha Dutta, Manager, IT, represented the university at the IMC-2023.
More than 1,200 students, faculty members and others witnessed the live-stream of the inaugural program of IMC-2023 at the university auditorium.