Bharti Airtel initially launched its 5G offering in October 2022
Indian operator Bharti Airtel announced that its 5G service is now available to customers in 3,000 cities and towns in the country.
In a release, the company said that all key urban and rural parts of the country have unlimited access to Airtel 5G Plus service.
Randeep Sekhon, CTO at Bharti Airtel, said: “We’re excited to cover large parts of the country with the power of 5G. Bridging every town and key rural areas in India by September 2023 remains our commitment as we continue to add 30-40 cities and towns every single day.”
The executive said that the telco’s 5G offering will generate new business models in sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare and education.
Airtel is engaged in talks with nearly 50 companies to co-develop enterprise use cases in the 5G field, according to recent reports. Airtel expects that the 5G technology will generate more revenue in the business-to-business (B2B) segment compared to the business-to-consumer (B2C) segment in the coming year.
In October 2022, Bharti Airtel initially launched 5G services in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Siliguri, Nagpur and Varanasi.
The carrier is currently using equipment from Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung to provide 5G services. The Indian operator had secured a total of 19,800 megahertz of spectrum in the 900 MHz, 1.8 GHz, 2.1 GHz, 3.3 GHz and 26 GHz bands in a recent auction carried out by the Indian government.
Rival operator Reliance Jio Infocomm recently claimed its 5G footprint reached 2,300 cities and towns across India at the end of Q-1 Jio has already deployed over 60,000 5G sites across the 700MHz and 3.5GHz bands.
However, according to the carrier’s website, Reliance Jio Infocomm is currently offering its 5G service in 2,691 cities across 35 states in India.
About a third of wireless data users in India, or 300 million subscribers, are expected to use 5G services by March 2025, according to a recent report by local Crisil Ratings.
