5G Innovation Hackathon 2026:
The 5G Innovation Hackathon 2026 aims to bring together students, startups, and professionals to
develop cutting-edge solutions using 5G labs in 100 institutes across India. The Hackathon will
facilitate solution development in key technology areas such as AI-driven network maintenance,
IoT-enabled applications, smart healthcare, industrial automation, quantum communication, and more.
The hackathon provides a collaborative platform to the stakeholders to innovate and develop
prototypes/applications/solutions through access to 5G labs, mentorship from industry and academic
experts during the hackathon, provision of seed funding to the shortlisted proposals, and support
for commercialization.
Hackathon Rules:
- Participants must be undergraduate/postgraduate students, startups, professionals or in
their collaboration with others.
- Each team must submit a comprehensive proposal to any of the 5G Use case labs in 100
institutes outlining their problem statement, proposed solution, and expected impact.
- Each institutions shall recommend 1-5 proposals to the Department of Telecommunications
(DoT) after internal screening.
- Proposals will go through regional and national shortlisting before progressing to prototype
development.
- Teams will have access to labs for prototype development, and will be provided mentorship by
experts.
- The shortlisted proposals at regional level will be provided seed funding for further
development of projects.
- The final evaluation will be based on technical execution, scalability, market readiness,
societal impact, and novelty.
- Winning teams will receive cash prizes and opportunities to showcase their projects on
national platforms.
- Intellectual property rights (IPR) support will be provided for viable solutions.
Call for Proposals opens: 20 March 2026 - 26 April 2026
Thematic Areas:
- 5G / 5G Advanced–based use cases
- Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for telecom technology
- IoT-enabled applications in sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, education, industrial
automation, finance and others
- 5G / 5G Advanced–based applications for disaster management, RedCap user equipment, and
Fixed Wireless Access (FWA).
- Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) and their integration with 5G / 5G Advanced systems.
- 5G use cases leveraging advanced network capabilities, including network slicing, Quality of
Service (QoS), and other native 5G features.
- Telecom security solutions relevant to next-generation communication systems.
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