Bharti Airtel carried out 5G SA trials in a city in the north of India
Indian operator Bharti Airtel aims to launch fixed wireless access (FWA) services for factories using 5G Standalone architecture (SA), Indian news site Mint reported, citing the telco’s managing director Gopal Vittal.
“The launch of our fixed wireless access network will be on SA. In some factories, in plants, we may actually deploy SA. This is in the short term, but in the more medium term, as more and more traffic shifts from 4G networks to 5G networks, we will take our existing spectrum bands, and refarm them to move to an all SA network. We’re already in the midst of a trial,” the executive said.
Vittal also said that that trials for 5G SA were carried out in a city in the northern region of the country with 30 sites. Currently, rival operator Reliance Jio Infocomm is the only carrier in India to offer 5G services on SA architecture using the 700 MHz band.
Local newspaper The Economic Times reported that Bharti Airtel currently has over 65 million 5G subscribers. According to Vittal, the contribution of 5G users to the telco’s overall subscriber base was still low at around 15-16%
He added that 5G technology will account for nearly 25% of the overall mobile base in India by March 2025.
The executive also noted that the telco is not yet seeing a real monetization of 5G in the consumer segment. “Unfortunately, 5G has become really about free data today in India. So, there is no real monetization on the consumer side,” Vittal said during a recent conference call with investors.
“Fixed wireless access will give you some ability to monetize, but it’s really modest in the overall scheme of things given the capex that’s gone behind 5G,” Vittal said.
Bharti Airtel is currently working with a large auto ancillary manufacturer and a handset company in South India, and another big player in industrial equipment in the west, for the delivery private 5G networks, Vittal said.
“I think monetization is about overall tariff repair. Free 5G data is obviously a headwind on any sort of monetization,” he added.
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.
In August 2023, Bharti Airtel announced that its 5G FWA offering, dubbed Airtel Xstream AirFiber, was available for its customers in Delhi and Mumbai. The operator said that the new service, which will offer internet to consumers in fiber dark areas, will address the last-mile connectivity issue in both rural and urban India where access to fiber infrastructure is a challenge.
Airtel noted that Xstream AirFiber is a plug-and-play device, with built-in Wi-Fi 6 technology that will offer wide indoor coverage and can simultaneously connect up to 64 devices. Airtel said it plans to launch the service in multiple cities and scale up nationally in phases.
