Four months after the launch of its 5G services, Bharti Airtel on Monday said the network’s subscriber base has crossed the 10-million mark. The company has launched 5G in 134 cities so far and targets to cover every part of the country by end of March 2024.
An increase in 5G subscribers count for Airtel can be attributed to growing penetration of compatible smartphones, higher spends on the network infrastructure and rise in content consumption in the form of videos, gaming, etc, over the network, according to experts.
“These are early days, but we are thrilled with the response we have received from our customers. Airtel will continue to stay true to its commitment to build a more connected, equitable and sustainable network,” said Randeep Sekhon, chief technology officer at Bharti Airtel. “With cutting-edge 5G infrastructure, a fantastic partner ecosystem and a dedicated workforce that is customer obsessed, we believe we are on the right path to win and deliver a world-class 5G Plus experience to customers across the length and breadth of the country,” Sekhon added.
In November last year, Airtel had over 1 million 5G subscribers. The telecom operator is deploying 5G on a non-standalone architecture (NSA) mode, under which the network technology is deployed on top of 4G and devices use the existing 4G network for functions such as initiating calls and setting up initial connections, while 5G is used for faster data transfers. The NSA mode is cost-effective.
As of December end, Airtel’s total mobile subscribers base in the country was at 332.24 million.
“The interesting thing is that on the NSA technology, our commercial trials are giving us 30% higher coverage than what we would have had if we have gone to SA (standalone architecture,” Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO (India and South Asia)of Bharti Airtel, said in a post-earnings call with analysts.
Owing to the switch in traffic on 5G from 4G at its tower sites, Airtel has also started directing its investments on building 5G infrastructure rather than 4G.
“If you look at an individual customer, on a particular site that has 5G, about 25-35% of traffic is already getting offloaded on 5G from 4G consumption. So, 5G could be a capacity offload of 4G and therefore, one of the things that we are looking at is to squeeze out our 4G capacity investments,” Vittal added.
Airtel usually spends about Rs 35,000 crore per year in its India business alone. While it does not expect an overall increase in capex over the next three years, it may frontload some of the investments early to support the 5G network rollout.
“We expect Bharti to spend Rs 45,400 crore on 5G and allied capex over FY23-25 (Rs 66,600 crore over FY23-27) to reach 5G coverage of 70% by FY25 and 85% by FY27,” brokerage house ICICI Securities said, adding that 5G rollout is expected to be faster than 4G, and capex spent on 5G will be lower than 4G for Bharti Airtel compared to Jio, which is expected to spend Rs 94,000 crore over the FY23-27 period.
In 4G, the network was deployed on multiple spectrum bands — 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz, and 2300 MHz — compared to only 3500 MHz in 5G for Bharti Airtel. For Jio, spectrum deployment in 4G was in the bands of 800 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2300 MHz compared to 700 MHz and 3500 MHz for 5G.
According to ICICI Securities, Bharti has invested Rs 1.12 trillion on 4G over FY17-22 and Jio put in Rs 1.67 trillion during the same period.
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“We expect Bharti to add 41,000 5G radio in FY23 and 134,000 in FY24. This means Bharti will have loaded 5G on 50% of its towers with 3500 MHz band and 10% with 26 GHz band for capacity and FWA (fixed wireless access),” ICICI Securities said.
Using fixed wireless access in 5G, telecom operators can provide high speeds wirelessly through routers, thereby doing away with the need for fibre broadband.
According to Nokia India Mobile Broadband Index, initial trends of data consumption suggests that 5G has started picking up across circles and its traffic in metro is 3-5% of total data traffic as of December 2022.