The 5G base transceiver stations (BTS) count in India went up by a mere few thousand in the last few months. After an aggressive start, the Indian telecom operators have slowed the 5G rollout, and for obvious reasons. Firstly, they have covered a huge part of India with 5G, and secondly, since there's no major monetisation happening, the capex towards 5G rollout has been moderated. Regardless, the 5G BTS count in India crossed the 4.6 lakh figure in October 2024. Just for some context, the 4.5 lakh 5G BTS figure was crossed in July, while to add another 10k sites, telcos took four months.
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In 2022 and 2023, the telcos were adding about 15k to 20k sites every month, and in some months, even more than this. At the end of October 2024, the total 5G BTS site count was 4,60,592. During the same time last year, this figure was 3,08,466. So even though the pace of the 5G BTS rollout has slowed in recent months, it has still grown quite a bit YoY.
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Uttar Pradesh has the most 5G BTS amongst all the states in comparison. According to the data from the Department of Telecommunications, Uttar Pradesh had 51,896 5G BTS. The growth in numbers won't stop and come to a zero from here. It has only slowed down because of the aforementioned reasons. However, once Vodafone Idea (Vi) and BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited) start rolling out 5G, the numbers are likely to grow at a rapid pace again. Vi isn't expected to be very aggressive, but the rollout should take up the overall numbers quite significantly as all the four operators would then be deploying and rolling out 5G sites.
