OnePlus today announced that all its 5G-capable flagship number and Nord-series smartphones work with the Airtel and Jio 5G network now. This includes devices dating back to 2020. Additionally, the Chinese smartphone maker said that it has concluded necessary testing on Vodafone-Idea (Vi) 5G network in New Delhi and that OnePlus 5G devices will support it, too, once the service is more widely available across India.
OnePlus launched its first 5G phone(s) under the OnePlus 8 line-up in India in 2020. Every OnePlus phone launched since then has been 5G-ready right out of the gate. This includes high-end phones like the OnePlus 10 Pro and OnePlus 10T to the budget and value-oriented OnePlus Nord CE 2 Lite 5G, which is the brand’s most affordable device in the sub Rs 20,000 price segment.
“We are thrilled to join hands with the leading telecom players of India to bring the transformational 5G technology to our India community,” Navnit Nakra, OnePlus India CEO and Head of India region for OnePlus said in a prepared statement, adding that “We are positive that our future-ready smartphones combined with superior 5G network capabilities offered by our telecom partners, would empower our users with seamless technology. And it would help them achieve a lot more through their daily lives.”
5G in India
Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged-off 5G services rollout in India on October 1, 2022 during the India Mobile World Congress event. Airtel and Reliance Jio have started rolling out 5G for users in select cities, following the announcement, and slowly and gradually ramped up on availability.
Airtel 5G, for instance, is available in more than 18 cities at the time of writing including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Siliguri, Nagpur, Varanasi, Panipat, Gurugram, Guwahati, Patna, Lucknow, Shimla, Imphal, Ahmedabad, Vizag and Visakhapatnam. The telco plans to cover all of urban India in 2023 while pan-India rollout is expected by March 2024.
Jio, on the other hand, already offers 5G –through an invite-only welcome offer— in nearly 50 cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Varanasi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Nathdwara, Pune, Gurugram, Noida, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, and 33 district headquarters of Gujarat. It plans to deliver 5G to “every town, every taluka, and every tehsil of our country by December 2023”.
While Jio is offering standalone 5G with zero dependency on 4G network, Airtel is relying on non-standalone technology. Though their networks are live, OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like OnePlus need to unlock support –for the said networks— by pushing out software updates (even if their devices are 5G capable). The timeline for this— as it turns out— could vary depending on how long an OEM takes for testing. While brands like Samsung and Apple (and OnePlus) have rolled out support, others like Google are yet to do it.
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