Bharti Airtel initially launched its 5G network in India in October 2022
Indian telco Bharti Airtel announced it has reached over 50 million unique 5G customers within one year of the launch of its 5G network, the operator said in a release.
The company also announced that its Airtel 5G Plus service is already available across all the 28 states and eight union territories in India.
Randeep Sekhon, CTO of Bharti Airtel said: “We are thrilled at the speed of adoption to 5G by millions of our customers and we are reaching this milestone earlier than planned. This marks a big expansion of Airtel’s 5G coverage going from 1 million in October of 2022 to 50 million in just 12 months of the launch. The expansion continues at full speed and I am sure, we will continue to rapidly multiply as we work towards nationwide coverage and enable all our customers to enter the 5G age.”
In October 2022, Bharti Airtel initially launched 5G services in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Siliguri, Nagpur and Varanasi.
Airtel 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 previous auction carried out by the Indian government.
Previous reports revealed that Bharti Airtel had been engaged in talks with nearly 50 companies to co-develop enterprise use cases in the 5G field. 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.
Indian carrier Reliance Jio Infocomm expects to complete the national rollout of 5G by the end of this year, according to Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Jio’s parent company Reliance Industries.
“We will have nearly one million 5G cells operational in the network by December. In just nine months, Jio 5G is already present in over 96% of the census towns of our country. And we’re on track to cover the entire country by December of this year. This makes Jio 5G the fastest-ever 5G rollout of this scale anywhere in the world,” the executive said.
The executive noted that the carrier already reached 450 million subscribers, of which 50 million have already migrated to 5G.
Reliance Jio Infocomm has been rapidly expanding its 5G network using Standalone (SA) architecture since October 2022. The telco has already deployed its 5G service in 7,764 cities across 36 states in India, according to the carrier’s website.
Also, Vodafone Idea is in the final stage of negotiations with banks to secure funding, which will be key for the launch of its 5G network infrastructure in the country, according to previous reports.
Also, state-run telco BSNL recently secured key spectrum from the government in order to launch 4G and 5G services nationwide.
