Airtel ends June with 90 million 5G customers

Airtel had ended the previous fiscal quarter with 72 million customers in the 5G field

Indian telco Bharti Airtel ended its first fiscal quarter of 2025 on June 30, with a total of 90 million 5G subscribers, the telco’s managing director, Gopal Vittal, said during a conference call with investors.

The executive noted that the company had ended the previous fiscal quarter with 72 million customers in the 5G field.

“5G shipments continue to grow and we continue to gain market share,” Vittal said.

Rival operator Reliance Jio Infocomm had ended June with 130 million 5G customers.

The executive highlighted that Bharti Airtel is expecting to launch Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) via 5G Standalone (5G SA) architecture. “We are planning to go live with SA technology for FWA within [fiscal] Q2. It should be noted that our core, transport and radio networks are all SA-ready,” Vittal added.

Reliance Jio Infocomm had initially launched 5G services in India using 5G SA architecture, while Airtel launched 5G using a 5G NonStandalone (5G NSA) network.

Bharti Airtel recently confirmed that it has started re-farming its existing mid-band spectrum with the main aim of accommodating the growing traffic demand on its 5G network.

To accommodate the growing number of customers migrating to its 5G network, Airtel said it is in the process of re-farming its mid-band spectrum to expand 5G services on its 1.8 GHz, 2.1 GHz and 2.3 GHz bands across India.

Airtel’s 5G service is now available across all 28 states and 8 union territories in India.

Finnish vendor Nokia recently said it has successfully completed its first 5G Non-Standalone cloud RAN trial with Bharti Airtel. The trial took place in an over-the-air environment utilizing 3.5 GHz spectrum for 5G and 2.1 GHz for 4G.

Nokia noted that data calls were successfully performed with commercial user devices over Airtel’s commercial network achieving a throughput of over 1.2 Gbps. The trial used Nokia’s RAN Software for virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU) and virtualized Centralized Unit (vCU) running on x86 Hardware with a CaaS layer.

Airtel is currently using equipment from Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung to provide 5G services. The Indian operator had secured a total of 19,800 megahertz of spectrum in the 900 MHz, 1.8 GHz, 2.1 GHz, 3.3 GHz and 26 GHz bands in a previous auction carried out by the Indian government in July 2022. Last month, the telco secured additional spectrum to expand its 5G offering.

“In the recently concluded spectrum auction, we successfully renewed spectrum that was expiring in six circles and further bolstered our sub-giga hertz and mid-band holding in key circles,” Vittal added.