OCPP EV Chargers in India: How to Verify Real Openness

What OCPP support does and does not promise

It promises the charger speaks a standard protocol. It does not promise that you can point it at a different backend, that the vendor will tell you how, or that the charger will behave identically when you do.

A charger can be genuinely OCPP compliant while the backend address is locked, the configuration is inaccessible, or the vendor's platform is the only one it has been tested against.

The tests that establish real portability

1. 1

   Can you change the backend URL yourself?

   Without the vendor, without a service visit, and with documented access. If the answer is no, the charger is not portable regardless of protocol support.

2. 2

   Can you read and set configuration keys?

   Access to the configuration is what lets a new platform bring the charger into a working state.

3. 3

   Has it been tested against another platform?

   Ask for evidence, not assurance. A charger tested only against its vendor's own backend has unknown behaviour elsewhere.

4. 4

   What happens to your data?

   Session records held only in the vendor platform, in a format you cannot export, are a dependency the protocol does not address.

5. 5

   Who controls firmware?

   If only the vendor can update the charger, portability at the protocol layer is limited by dependency at the firmware layer.

Ask for a demonstration

The decisive test is simple: ask the vendor to connect a unit to a backend that is not theirs, in front of you, and start a session. Vendors whose chargers are genuinely portable find this straightforward. The reaction to the request is informative regardless of the outcome.

Why this matters more in India

The platform landscape is still consolidating, and operators change backend more often than they change hardware. A charger fleet that cannot move platforms turns a software decision into a hardware replacement, which is the expensive form of lock-in.

Version support is a starting point

OCPP 1.6J is the most widely deployed version and 2.0.1 adds capability that most Indian deployments do not yet require. Either way, version support tells you less than a demonstrated connection to a second platform does.

Buying OCPP does not mean buying interoperability

This is the most consequential misunderstanding in the Indian market right now, and it costs buyers real money.

A customer of ours bought a charger sold as an OCPP unit. Its OCPP was not interoperable with the backend they needed to run it on. Nothing on the datasheet was untrue. A version number is a claim about a protocol. Their requirement was about a specific platform, at a specific release, exchanging the particular messages their operation depended on. Those are not the same claim and only one of them was ever made.

Our own position goes further. OCPP support inside a charger is a small part of what makes a fleet work. The real problem is operational interoperability: whether the unit does the right thing with the site, the supply, the vehicle and the platform, repeatedly, for years. No protocol version answers that, and a procurement process that stops at the version number has not started on it.

How we would work through this with you

If you are specifying chargers now, we can test the claim against the platform actually intended for the site, before purchase. That is a short piece of work and it frequently changes a procurement decision.

We manufacture chargers, so treat our view accordingly. Where the right answer is a vendor other than us, we will tell you, and we would rather be the people who said so early than the people who sold into a problem.