Vodafone Idea said it will initially offer 5G services in Delhi and Mumbai
Indian carrier Vodafone Idea expects to begin rolling out commercial 5G services by March 2025 across 17 priority circles across the country, starting with Delhi and Mumbai, according to local press reports.
Vodafone Idea, the third-largest private telecom operator in India, also aims to reach at least 90% of India’s population with 4G coverage by June 2025, compared to current 77%
As part of its revival plan, Vodafone Idea has recently raised fresh funds to improve 4G coverage and roll out 5G to prevent further subscriber losses. Rival operators Reliance Jio Infocomm and Bharti Airtel already offer 5G services nationwide and operate an extensive 4G network.
“We are going a little slow [with 5G], but we will be doing 5G in Delhi and Mumbai first, and of course, all metros and major cities across 17 states,” Jagbir Singh, Vodafone Idea’s CTO, was quoted as saying.
Additionally, the executive mentioned that the telco, which is a joint venture between the U.K.’s Vodafone Group and India’s Aditya Birla Group would continue focusing on the 17 licensed areas or telecom circles for both 4G and 5G coverage, including roaming customers, the reports added.
Vodafone Idea has recently concluded different deals worth $3.6 billion with Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung for the supply of network equipment over a period of three years. The Asian telco noted that the deal marks the first step towards the implementation of the company’s three-year capex plan of nearly $6.6 billion. The capex program is directed towards expanding the 4G population coverage from current 1.03 billion people to 1.2 billion people, launching 5G technology in key markets as well as network capacity expansion in line with data growth.
As part of the expansion plans, Vodafone Idea will concentrate on expanding and deploying 4G to improve network quality, provide more capacity and fully leverage its spectrum holdings to meet growing demand. The telco currently holds spectrum in the 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2.1 GHz, 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz bands.
“In the 900 MHz band we had only 55,000 sites. Now we are going to 150,000 sites, out of which 50,000 are already done. Another 50,000 sites will be done by the next nine months,” Singh said.
The executive also commented on the telco’s plans to replace certain telecom gear supplied by Chinese vendors.
“When we floated a request for proposals (RFP), it included these Chinese equipment swap plans, if not immediately, but at least keeping in mind some equipment will come to end of life, end of support, so we will replace them. But do we have the plan within, like two years, to replace everything? The answer is no,” Singh was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, Singh also noted that the telco’s experience with O-RAN has not been very promising so far.
Under its partnership with US-based firm Mavenir, Vodafone Idea has deployed O-RAN-based infra in Jalandhar.
“This was given (to Mavenir) around a year back, for 4G and 5G both. So, we had done the deployment, and initially we had a lot of hiccups. There is no doubt that the maturity of O-RAN is still not there. In fact, total cost of ownership [of O-RAN infra] is more expensive rather than being cheaper,” Singh, said. He went on to say that the telco does not expect large commercial O-RAN deployments in the near future.
The reports also highlighted that Vodafone Idea has started talks with tech companies like IBM, Accenture, Microsoft and Google to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied in telecom.
