Bharti Airtel has taken a protracted strategy to improve to the 5G SA (standalone) for its customers. Firstly, the corporate will deliver 5G SA for the FWA (fastened wi-fi entry) customers. It is because Airtel believes that 5G SA would have been an overkill to start with as 5G NSA, which took much less value to deploy, was greater than sufficient for the market. As market evolves and extra 5G gadgets enter the ecosystem then Airtel will have a look at 5G SA transition for the cellular clients as nicely.
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The telco isn’t trying to make investments too closely into 5G because the tech hasn’t actually delivered the potential it was anticipated to. This was ecohed by Airtel’s chief not too long ago.
Airtel’s Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Gopal Vittal, stated in the course of the current earnings name for Q2 FY26, “one of many ache factors within the telecom world throughout the globe is that 5G has not lived its promise of what it was meant to. The first use case of 5G is just pace and now it’s only a extra environment friendly means of manufacturing the identical gigabyte, it’s a extra environment friendly means of doing it, nevertheless it has not led to any monetization, wherever on the planet.”
The Indian telecom operators have primarily monetised 5G via the FWA providers. As for the cellular clients, the telcos have used 5G as a bait for the customers to recharge with increased priced plans. So whereas some degree of monetisation has occurred, it would not actually justify the ROI (return on funding) on 5G capex, which is in billions of {dollars} or hundreds of crores.
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“There have been some experiments and a few strikes on standalone via slicing in some markets just like the US and so forth, however it’s too small and to few and much between to make a significant distinction to the general monetization that was promised,” added Vittal.
