Step out of a metro and onto a highway, and the country’s 5G story quickly shifts from blazing speeds to buffering screens. Four years after launch, the country’s telecom networks present a tale of two experiences: dense urban pockets with strong, stable signals, and vast stretches where connectivity drops, fluctuates or disappears altogether. For millions of users, access to 5G still depends less on coverage claims and more on whether a tower happens to be within reach.
The scale of rollout is not in question. Operators have deployed over 500,000 5G base stations, with services extending to almost all districts. Reliance Jio alone is estimated to have over 250 million 5G users, accounting for more than half its subscriber base, alongside a nationwide standalone network.
Bharti Airtel has matched this expansion across urban markets, though it has not disclosed a separate 5G user base and continues to rely on a non-standalone architecture. Vodafone Idea, by contrast, remains a late entrant, with services limited to a few dozen cities and a planned expansion to just over 100. The divergence across operators underscores a larger paradox: rollout has been rapid, but uniform coverage remains elusive.
Decoding telecom coverage and speed gaps
Part of the gap lies in how coverage is defined and reported. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has mandated the publication of coverage maps to improve transparency, but these rely on permissive technical thresholds that do not always reflect usable signal strength. Its latest quality of service data reinforces the point.
Operators continue to meet most regulatory benchmarks, including call drop rates and network availability, but these are threshold-based metrics that allow for variability in real-world performance. Drive tests conducted by the regulator show significant variation in data speeds and signal quality across locations.
“Coverage on paper is not the same as usable signal,” says telecom analyst Parag Kar. “The framework measures whether a connection exists, not whether it performs consistently in motion or indoors.”
Expectations that policy changes would close this gap have also not materialised. Electromagnetic field exposure norms were relaxed to allow higher transmission power, but telecom networks operate across multiple spectrum bands – 700 MHz, 2100 MHz and 3500 MHz – whose combined emissions are capped under a worst-case framework.
This limits the extent to which higher-frequency 5G bands can fully utilise increased power. At the same time, network design has prioritised capacity over coverage, with operators focusing on high-traffic zones rather than extending range. Higher transmission power also risks interference between adjacent sites, reducing efficiency.
There is, finally, a device-side constraint. Handsets operate under strict power limits, creating an uplink bottleneck even when towers transmit at higher strength. “Even if the tower transmits more power, the handset response remains capped,” Kar points out. In effect, permissive metrics, spectrum constraints, capacity-led design and handset limits have meant that while 5G rollout has delivered scale, there have not been proportionate gains in coverage on the ground.