April 2026 - In this interview, we speak to Gopalakrishnan R. (GR) who is head of Vodafone Idea’s IoT Business Unit and the IoT Innovation Lab. This is an expanding partnership that involves India’s Centre for Development of Telematics and, since 2025, Amazon Web Services.
Q: Would you begin by introducing yourself to our readers?
GR: I am Gopal and an Executive Vice President (EVP) with Vodafone Idea Limited (Vi) with responsibilities as CTO and Business Head for IoT at Vi Business. I joined Vodafone Idea in June 2021, bringing extensive experience in telecommunications, technology solutions, and enterprise services. My expertise involves driving digital transformation for enterprise clients using 5G and IoT technologies.
I lead initiatives in B2B technology solutions, IoT, data centres, managed services, and service assurance. Prior to joining Vi, I held senior positions at Tata Communications, where I was the Global Head of Services, and Jio Platforms Limited, where I was the Senior Vice President of Technology position. I also graduated from the Fellow Program in Management (Strategy) from the Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon.
Q: Vodafone Idea is a large business based in India. Would you describe the organization and its IoT business unit for our readers?
GR: Vodafone Idea Limited is a strategic partnership between the Aditya Birla Group and the Vodafone Group. We are one of India’s leading telecom service providers. India’s cellular market consists of geographic territories that are known as circles. We have a strong spectrum portfolio, including mid-band 5G in 17 circles and mm Wave spectrum in sixteen circles, which we use to deliver voice and data services across 2G, 4G, and 5G networks.
Vi Business is the enterprise arm of Vodafone Idea Limited. It plays a key role in empowering organizations with enterprise-grade telecom and digital solutions. With a strong focus on AI, connectivity, and security, Vi Business supports businesses across India in driving innovation, improving efficiency, and accelerating digital growth.
Vi Business IoT has long been a thought leader and ecosystem orchestrator that builds on the union between Vodafone India and Idea Cellular when their respective IoT divisions were merged to form the current business structure.
We were the first Telco to launch the GSMA’s certified eSIM and integrated IoT solution in 2020 across major industry verticals. We also have India’s first telco-led IoT Innovation lab for device testing and certification. We were the first Telco to enable Smart meter deployments in India. Recently, we expanded our smart meter solution to the City Gas Distribution Sector, strengthening our position in the smart energy market.
On the connectivity front, we power a major share of connected car, meters, vehicles, point-of-sale (POS), and soundbox devices. We are active in supporting end-to-end solutions and have a presence in multiple industries and enterprises for tracking solutions, asset management, and other solutions.
Q: What market dynamics and patterns of demand are you seeing in India’s IoT market?
GR: From what I see, India’s IoT market has moved decisively from experimentation to scale. Large adoption has happened in smart metering, connected vehicles, fleet management, industry automation, POS, and other sectors.
On top of that, the Union Budget 2026-27 positions India as an "AI-first" nation. That will drive a massive fiscal push for AI and IoT integration to boost economic productivity. It makes a difference that the topic has high level political visibility with the Hon’ble Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman mentioning “AI” on eleven occasions. Her remarks covered multiple sectors ranging from Agri-tech to manufacturing and smart infrastructure.
In terms of enterprise users, I see a change in the pattern of demand compared to a few years ago. The focus is shifting from uptime to business value and outcomes at scale. There is also a shift from availability to predictable performance at scale. Businesses want IoT solutions that work consistently across geographies, device types, and network conditions, not just in controlled pilots. Once again, the recent Union Budget will push demand for reliable-performance use cases and for critical-operations use cases. Enterprises are also experiencing an AI boom and looking at using AI along with IoT. There is a clear shift from automation to value-based outcomes.
At the same time, we are seeing in the market a proliferation of low cost, unhardened devices and solutions built on proprietary protocols. While these help reduce upfront costs, they introduce challenges around security, interoperability, diagnostics, and long-term maintainability. When field issues arise, enterprises struggle to isolate whether the problem lies in the device, firmware, application, or network.
One final observation is about government policy priorities. These highlight indigenous fabrication in India, regulatory frameworks, the work done by the Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC) and TSDSI in implementing standards and Testing procedures, and Initiatives like Vi Business IoT Innovation Lab. Enterprise users recognize these developments as effective enablers for IoT transformation in India.
Q: What factors led to the launch of Vi Business IoT Innovation Lab?
GR: Vi Business IoT has been a trusted partner in the digital transformation journeys of many of our enterprise customers. That gives a good sense of industry dynamics and what we need to do to respond to changes in demand. We examined our customer deployments closely and noticed three clear challenges across most of them:
- One is the high cost of innovation and longer POC cycles because of a fragmented IoT ecosystem,
- The second is post deployment failures leading to costly repairs and replacements,
- And thirdly we saw the difficulty in scaling up caused by interoperability limitations.
There were several other lesser factors besides the above three. For example, device behaviours vary widely under different network conditions. Also, inefficient application design leads to significant congestion and downtime. For such issues, there was no single place capable of testing individual solutions and interoperability under multiple, real network conditions that a solution would experience over its operational life. We created the IoT Innovation Lab to fill such gaps.
The lab is a first-of-its-kind, telco-led certification and co-creation environment in India. Inside the Lab, we see ideas inspired by real-world uses cases. Along with other IoT ecosystem players, we orchestrate opportunities to co-create solutions in the lab. Here, we can validate devices and solutions for network performance prior to deployment. Enterprise customers can see IoT in action before real world roll out. The Lab’s environment also helps us to see the transformation of ideas into real, businesses impact use cases. This initiative enables quicker adoption in the Indian IoT ecosystem while reducing cost, risk, and deployment uncertainty.
Q: Vodafone Idea launched the Lab in partnership with AWS and C-DOT. How did that come about?
GR: The Amazon Web Services and C-DoT partnerships are a natural progression for us. Together, we share a common vision of driving India’s future with IoT that is scalable, secure, and interoperable.
We started early with C-DoT via a partnership agreement signed in 2022. Both organizations decided to leverage each other’s expertise and address the gap of interoperability in Indian IoT ecosystem.
C-DoT brings in expertise of telecommunications-sector standards, including oneM2M. With C-DoT, we not only test and certify devices for network performance on the Vi Network but we also promote oneM2M standards. We test IoT devices across 175+ test cases based on 3GPP technical specifications, combining our deployment experience and C-DoT’s network expertise.
In addition, we also guide M2M service providers to design solutions in line with oneM2M standards. We then test compatibility with C-DoT’s Common Service Platform (CCSP- oneM2M compatible platform).
Our decision to host CCSP inside the Lab is part of our broader effort to provide partners a neutral environment to explore standards-based interoperability without making oneM2M mandatory or prescriptive. This approach helps us to stay aligned with evolving national frameworks.
AWS, our other key partner, enables co-creation of AI/ ML based use cases for our enterprise customers. Their expertise is in cloud, compute, and AI domains. AWS signed the partnership agreement in 2025 when we expanded the scope of the Lab from “testing and certification of devices” to “drive industry centric innovation”. AWS brings in ecosystem partners to design, develop, and prototype future use cases.
Together with AWS and C-DoT, the Lab acts as an enabler for the ecosystem to build, prototype, validate and deploy scalable IoT use cases.
Q: Would you describe what facilities are available in the Lab?
GR: The lab is located in Mumbai. It is open to OEMs, M2M Solution providers, startups, and enterprises that want to test their products for network behaviour. These organizations can also co-create new IoT applications. It is a space to inspire bold ideas, orchestrate opportunities and transform businesses. Hence, broadly the lab offers the following facilities:
- Testing and certification
- Co-creation
As a part of testing and certification zone, the lab offers multi-RAT testbeds (2G/4G/ NB-IoT/ 5G), network simulation through RF simulators and live network in controlled environments. A typical test plan on a device runs a series of bench tests on a live network, tests with 3GPP based RF simulators, as well as tests under varying network conditions in controlled as well as field environments.
We test device behaviours across these scenarios and provide a certification if all critical and major test cases pass successfully. The team also gives recommendations on design best practices for seamless network performance for devices. For enterprises and M2M service providers, this means reliable operations on field.
As a part of co-creation zone, the lab brings together multiple ecosystem players under one roof. There is a lot of expertise, especially in the verticals of Connected Cars, Vehicle Telematics, Smart Grids, POS, Manufacturing, and Retail. For enterprises and M2M service providers, this results in quick solutions at lower cost of innovation.
Partners retain the base intellectual property (IP) for their products. During the co-creation process we discuss any incremental development IP.
Q: What have been the early results from the Lab?
GR: In the first quarter of launch, we already certified multiple devices and onboarded new partners. We saw strong engagement from automotive OEMs, utilities, POS providers, IoT startups, Manufacturing and regulatory. In numbers, the lab has certified 40 devices and modules, and hosted 20+ visitor organizations including the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), and our enterprise customers.
The Lab initiative has also triggered meaningful conversations on how to simplify scalability with ecosystem players. We have already created five innovative use cases, pilots of which are underway.
Vi focuses on using the power of AI and IoT to help enterprises streamline their operations. We see those flavours in our use cases. For example, in the AI based Energy optimization use case, we use the power of AI to identify opportunities of optimization and cost efficiencies in multiple utilities in a commercial or industrial deployment. The solution is specialized to work with steam, gas, water, and energy utilities. Likewise, we are developing AI based C-V2X use cases for connected vehicles to address problems of rear-end collisions and collisions die to limited visibility. This aligns with India’s vision to reduce road and highway fatalities.
We are also working on network API based use cases to transform point-of-sale and tracking applications that use AI to process intelligence from the network and deliver outcomes like fraud detection and geo-fencing. These use cases are being developed alongside enterprise customers to solve their business pain points in an innovative and commercially viable framework that is compliant to global standards.
Q: How does standardization play a role in the Lab?
GR: Our principle on this is simple. We support and promote standards that improve interoperability and reduce deployment friction. This includes 3GPP standards for network behaviour, oneM2M standards for application-level interoperability, and security standards from organizations such as NIST and the GSMA.
The idea is to speed up real work adoption. We host C-DoT’s CCSP in our lab to allow partners to explore, understand and test oneM2M-aligned architectures. The network test cases draw on 3GPP technical specifications and GSMA/NIST guidelines.
The lab enables ecosystem participants to make informed decisions based on real tests rather than theoretical assumptions. We see ourselves as enablers, and not enforcers of standards.
Q: Where do you see oneM2M fitting in the standardization landscape?
GR: At Vi Business, we see oneM2M as a critical step towards addressing fragmentation in the IoT ecosystem through a common, standards-based service layer. As a part of our IoT Innovation Lab, we have hosted a oneM2M Common Services Platform (from C-DoT) to enable interoperability testing and validate standards-aligned devices and applications.
While market adoption is still evolving, we believe oneM2M has strong potential to enable scalable, multi-vendor deployments across sectors. Our role as a telco is to actively support this transition by enabling neutral testing environments for the ecosystem to explore standard based interoperability and see its benefits- without making oneM2M mandate or prescriptive.
Q: Are there topics we have not touched upon that you would like to raise here?
GR: I believe India’s IoT ecosystem will scale faster when interoperability, certification, and co-creation become mainstream. Even if the device is MTCTE (Mandatory Testing and Certification for Telecommunication Equipment) certified as being network ready, operator certification is important to make the device deployment ready for various network conditions.
India needs more of facilities such as out Lab where collaboration and commercial growth become easy for the ecosystem. In order to exemplify this, think of connected things like smart meters, connected vehicles, and POS terminals that depend on multiple suppliers with each one bringing different components of the end solution. This involves a lot of hassle if enterprise customers have to deal with all individual component providers. On top of this, even if individual components have been tested, what the IoT Innovation lab does is to ensure that the solution in its entirety works in real life conditions.
Q: What advice do you have for IoT adopters?
GR: At Vi, we strongly believe that innovation is scalable only when done within the guardrails of standards and regulatory frameworks. I advise businesses to focus on testing early across multiple network conditions. Partnerships help you grow faster. Plan scale from day one. And adopt standards where they simplify your ecosystem, not because they exist, but because they deliver value.
Q: How can interested parties find out more?
GR: Interested parties can reach us through our webpage https://www.myvi.in/business/internet-of-things/iot-lab. We welcome device OEMs, module vendors, platform providers, and enterprises to evaluate solutions on our network test beds, including the opportunity to test on the CCSP instance hosted in the lab.
