<div id="readability-page-1"><div>//php echo do_shortcode('[responsivevoice_button voice=&#34;US English Male&#34; buttontext=&#34;Listen to Post&#34;]') ?&gt; India’s 5G networks are built largely on the sub-6 GHz spectrum, but the Indian government has also earmarked the 26-27 GHz band (n258) mmWave services. While mmWave remains part of official 5G roadmaps, its integration has been viewed as difficult to design, expensive to test and sensitive to real-world conditions, keeping it at the margins of mainstream engineering workflows in India.EE Times spoke to executives at Movandi Corporation and Analog Devices India to understand how mmWave is moving from a specialist-driven technology to a more practical engineering workflow, and what that means for design, calibration, testing and deployment in India.In the early phases of 5G rollout, mmWave faced problems that had nothing to do with timing or market readiness, but with basic physics. Signals in the 28-39 GHz range behave very differently from those most engineers are familiar with at sub-6 GHz. Links can be disrupted simply by walls, people, device orientation or nearby materials. These factors are often negligible at lower frequencies, which is why mmWave design and deployment require a very different approach. To cope with these losses and sensitivities, mmWave systems rely on a different transmission technique. Millimeter-wave radios do not broadcast energy uniformly. Instead, they concentrate energy into narrow beams to overcome higher path loss. The signal originates as digital data in a baseband processor. It is converted into an electrical waveform and then upconverted to very high radio frequencies. At these frequencies, arrays of small antennas work together, transmitting the same signal with precisely controlled timing offsets so that energy adds constructively in a chosen direction. This is beamforming. <h3>Why mmWave requires system-level co-design</h3>Founder and CEO of California-based startup Movandi Corporation, Maryam Rofougaran, explained the critical role of beamforming in mmWave design, adding that conventional approaches used at lower frequencies are insufficient. “You cannot achieve it with just using one antenna. The system, the architecture changes. You need careful coordination across all components—antennas, radio frequency front end, printed circuit board layout, packaging and thermal management—for reliable beamforming performance,” she said.With system-level co-design, Movandi ensures that the signal is not only directed efficiently but also resilient to the physical and environmental losses that typically plague mmWave deployments.Rofougaran believes that treating mmWave design as a system-level problem, co-designing RF circuitry, antennas, PCB layout, packaging and interconnect losses, can help avoid the performance surprises that emerge at high frequencies. “Low-frequency design techniques break down at mmWave, where even small discontinuities can cause significant signal loss and gain degradation,” she explained.Beyond modules and chips, Movandi is also developing smart repeaters for mesh networks, extending coverage and enabling multi-gigabit throughput in dense urban and indoor environments.While Movandi is tackling mmWave complexity through deep system-level co-design, Analog Devices is pursuing a more modular RF approach in India. The company is developing its own millimeter wave RF module with a standard connector designed to interface with existing motherboards.“Once it is ready, we will demo it to telcos and seek their support. Then we can work with their preferred equipment vendors,” said Vivek Tyagi, managing director of Analog Devices India.“The RF module does not require much software, but it does require some software code at the bottom. We put a small program and provide that code to whoever is going to manufacture it so that they can create their motherboard and make it talk to that motherboard,” Tyagi explained.<h3>What mmWave changes for India</h3>For India, where access to large mmWave-capable RF labs and test infrastructure is uneven, these approaches lower the initial barrier to entry, but they do not remove the need for specialized testing. Over-the-air validation, calibration and environmental testing remain essential, especially at higher frequencies.What changes are where engineering effort is concentrated. As RF front ends become more predictable, design teams can spend less time debugging unstable RF behavior and more time on system-level challenges, such as link budgeting, control software, thermal design, mechanical integration and deployment planning.India has treated mmWave as a future capability for much of the 5G cycle. Today, the conditions are changing. Operators hold spectrum; fixed wireless pilots are underway; and vendors are supplying more integrated platforms. What remains is the gradual accumulation of engineering experience.“All the major telcos have auctioned and got that spectrum [26–27 GHz] in India, but it is not utilized right now. They are now looking at whether, instead of laying fiber and digging roads, they can use existing telecom towers and deploy millimeter-wave radios to provide high-throughput connectivity,” Tyagi said.He added that mmWave radios can deliver roughly one gigabit per second throughput, with Ethernet cables from receiving units on apartment rooftops feeding multiple homes.Tyagi highlighted that early deployment for mmWave radios has happened in limited volumes in the U.S. Dense urban environments with high-rise apartments, such as Noida in Uttar Pradesh, are particularly suitable for mmWave, where it can coexist with fiber.The near-term opportunity is practical rather than aspirational. Indoor coverage units, fixed wireless access customer premises equipment, transport hubs, private network nodes and repeaters are all deployment categories where mmWave capability can be developed without tackling the full complexity of handset-class design.<h3>Build capability before demand peaks</h3>The apparent simplicity at the point of deployment does not remove the need to understand how RF, antennas and mechanics interact once devices leave controlled environments.“From the beginning, the package and the rest of the system have to be co-designed so that losses don’t show up as surprises later,” Rofougaran said. “For mmWave, engineers also need to understand over-the-air testing and calibration, because you can’t rely only on conducted measurements.”“If companies have not invested in this technology, it makes sense to start now. If you wait until the applications demand it, like AI applications that demand very high throughput and low latency, it will be too late. The work has to be done now so that by the time those are ready, you have the infrastructure to support it,” Rofougaran cautioned.She also framed the connection to future workloads. “Without getting this connectivity to the level we are talking about, I do not see how artificial intelligence applications are going to happen. We have to have the infrastructure supporting that.”When mmWave stops being the hardest problem in the system, it becomes easier to deploy. Engineering teams can spend less time troubleshooting unstable RF behavior and more time understanding how radios, antennas, software, mechanics and environments interact in real networks. Capability then builds through smaller, contained deployments rather than large speculative bets, gradually strengthening local engineering expertise.Mike Short, former chairman and board member of the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, described mmmWave today as “primarily for capacity, coverage and private network solutions,” and “less to do with mobility but higher speed services.” He cautioned that mmWave needs to be considered “within the mix of overall spectrum available.”In the Indian context, Short described mmWave as being in “early days,” and argued that progress depended on trials, demonstrators and learning from international deployments rather than assuming immediate scale. Millimeter-wave technology’s practicality in India is not about sudden mass adoption: it is about engineering readiness. That means building systems that work reliably in specific environments, understanding their limits and accumulating experience before demand peaks. As design tools mature and integration becomes more predictable, mmWave shifts from an experimental edge case to a deployable option in scenarios where its strengths, such as high throughput over short distances, actually matter.<h5>See also:</h5>mmWave 5G Mandates BeamformingMWC 2025: New Products RoundupStreetlights Offer Path to Rapid mmWave 5G </div></div>

India's 5G networks primarily utilize sub-6 GHz spectrum, but the government is also focusing on the 26-27 GHz mmWave band. Despite challenges in design and testing, companies like Movandi and Analog Devices are making mmWave more practical for engineering workflows. Movandi emphasizes system-level co-design for effective beamforming, while Analog Devices is developing modular RF modules to simplify integration. As telcos acquire mmWave spectrum, the focus shifts to utilizing existing infrastructure for high-speed connectivity, with potential throughput of around one gigabit per second.

What Makes mmWave Practical for India’s 5G Engineering