Bharti Airtel has said that it is upgrading its mobile networks to 5G SA (standalone) to offer FWA (fixed-wireless access) services. Airtel's FWA or AirFiber services are now present in 1300+ cities. The company won't have to incur any significant incremental capex to run SA as Airtel's radio and core network is already SA-ready.
Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel, said, "It is really some software that will need to be put in there and yes when we launch fixed wireless access on standalone by August or September we will be national with it."
So Airtel Xstream AirFiber customers will soon start experiencing 5G SA services in a month or two. While we have already heard why Airtel went for 5G NSA from the company's CEO, it is time that we understand why 5G SA is only being reserved for FWA.
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Why Airtel Wants 5G SA for FWA
For the unaware, with 5G NSA, the mobile device latches to 4G for uplink and 5G for downlink. This gives Airtel a coverage advantage as the company has a strong portfolio of sub-GHz bands. While this works perfectly in the scenarios of mobiles, it won't justify the FWA use case. Uplink becomes a limiting factor for customer experience if on the NSA mode for FWA, Gopal said.
Gopal was speaking on the investors' call on August 6, 2024, for results of Q1 FY25.
"....for capacity, FWA data consumption is almost 15 to 20x of mobile, which needs a dedicated network layer for downlink and uplink to serve this multi-device connectivity across mobiles, TVs at the Home. In such a scenario network slicing with SA enables a superior experience to customers," he said.
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Gopal added that Airtel is in a great position to offer SA using its 3.5 GHz spectrum along with a large pool of mid-band spectrum holding through carrier aggregation. The 5G SA services for FWA will start within this quarter, this has been confirmed by Airtel.
Note that Airtel doesn't plan to shift mobile network customers to 5G SA anytime soon. The decision to move from NSA to SA will depend on the number of users spending time on the 5G network. 5G SA and NSA can co-exist, Gopal said.
"Over time with 4G traffic moving to 5G and 5G’s time on technology increasing for the device we will configure changes to switch our mobile users to our 5G SA network. All of this will be done without additional capex and purchase of expensive sub-gigahertz spectrum. It should be noted that our core transport and radio networks are all SA ready. We have been running trials of 5G SA network in select regions for many quarters now to optimize the performance," he concluded.
