Airtel aims to launch FWA using 5G SA architecture in the short term
Indian carrier Bharti Airtel said its fixed wireless access (FWA) offering has reached over 1,300 towns and cities across India, local press reported.
The telco noted it is currently upgrading its networks to 5G Standalone (5G SA) technology to offer FWA services at a national level, adding that it won’t have to incur any significant incremental capital expenditures to run 5G SA services, because its radio and core network is already SA-ready.
“It is really some software that will need to be put in there and yes, when we launch fixed wireless access on Standalone by August or September we will be national with it,” Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel, recently said.
The executive added that Airtel is in a great position to offer 5G SA using its 3.5 GHz spectrum along with a large pool of mid-band spectrum holding through carrier aggregation.
However, the report noted that Airtel doesn’t plan to migrate mobile customers to 5G SA anytime soon. The decision to move customers from 5G Non-Standalone (5G NSA) to 5G SA will depend on the number of users spending time on the 5G network, the executive said.
“Over time with 4G traffic moving to 5G and 5G’s time on technology increasing for the device we will configure changes to switch our mobile users to our 5G SA network. All of this will be done without additional capex and purchase of expensive sub-gigahertz spectrum. It should be noted that our core transport and radio networks are all SA ready. We have been running trials of 5G SA network in select regions for many quarters now to optimize the performance,” Vittal added.
Bharti Airtel ended its first fiscal quarter of 2025 on June 30, with a total of 90 million 5G subscribers, Vittal, said during a recent conference call with investors.
The executive noted that the company had ended the previous fiscal quarter with 72 million customers in the 5G field.
Bharti Airtel recently confirmed that it has started re-farming its existing mid-band spectrum with the main aim of accommodating the growing traffic demand on its 5G network.
To accommodate the growing number of customers migrating to its 5G network, Airtel said it is in the process of re-farming its mid-band spectrum to expand 5G services on its 1.8 GHz, 2.1 GHz and 2.3 GHz bands across India.
Finnish vendor Nokia recently said it has successfully completed its first 5G Non-Standalone cloud RAN trial with Bharti Airtel. The trial took place in an over-the-air environment utilizing 3.5 GHz spectrum for 5G and 2.1 GHz for 4G.
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 July 2022. Last month, the telco secured additional spectrum to expand its 5G offering.
