Airtel aims to launch FWA using 5G SA architecture in the near future.
Indian telecommunications company Bharti Airtel has announced that its fixed wireless access (FWA) services have been expanded to more than 1,300 towns and cities across India, local newspapers reported.
The company said it is currently upgrading its network to 5G Standalone (5G SA) technology to provide FWA services at a nationwide level, adding that it does not need to make significant additional capital expenditures to run 5G SA services as its radio and core networks are already SA-enabled.
“What really needs to be put in place is the software and once we have launched fixed wireless access on a standalone basis by August or September, we will have a national rollout,” Bharti Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal said recently.
The executive added that Airtel is well positioned to offer 5G SA by leveraging the 3.5 GHz spectrum it holds through carrier aggregation and a large mid-band spectrum pool.
However, the report noted that Airtel has no plans to move its mobile customers to 5G SA anytime soon. The decision to move customers from 5G Non-Standalone (5G NSA) to 5G SA will depend on how many users spend time on the 5G network, the executive said.
“As 4G traffic transitions to 5G and the time spent on 5G technology on devices increases, we configure the changes to switch mobile users over to 5G SA networks. All this is done without any additional capex expenditure or purchase of expensive sub-gigahertz spectrum. Keep in mind that all our core transport and radio networks are SA-enabled. We have been trialling 5G SA network in select geographies over the last few quarters to optimise performance,” Vittal added.
In a recent investor call, Vittal said Bharti Airtel ended the first quarter of 2025 on June 30 with a total of 90 million 5G subscribers.
The executive noted that the company had 72 million 5G customers at the end of the last quarter.
Bharti Airtel recently confirmed that it has begun re-farming its existing mid-band spectrum with the primary objective of catering to the growing traffic demand for its 5G network.
Airtel has announced that it is in the process of refarming mid-band spectrum to expand its 5G services in the 1.8GHz, 2.1GHz and 2.3GHz bands across India to cater to the growing number of customers migrating to 5G networks.
Finnish vendor Nokia recently announced the successful completion of the first 5G non-standalone Cloud RAN trial with Bharti Airtel, which took place in a radio environment utilising the 3.5GHz band for 5G and the 2.1GHz band for 4G.
Airtel currently offers 5G services using equipment from Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung. The Indian operator had secured a total of 19,800 MHz of spectrum in the 900 MHz, 1.8 GHz, 2.1 GHz, 3.3 GHz and 26 GHz bands in the last auction conducted by the Indian government in July 2022. Last month, the operator secured additional spectrum to expand its 5G services.
