Bharti Airtel is fully prepared with its 5G Standalone (SA) Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) solution and can activate the network whenever the company deems it necessary. Additionally, over the last two quarters, Airtel's FWA availability has expanded across key locations, and the service is now live in over 2,000 cities. The company is also looking to double its broadband user base from over 45 million to anywhere between 80–90 million homes in the medium term. Airtel also added 1.9 million home passes via the FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) wired broadband route in the December quarter.
Also Read: Airtel to Migrate to Standalone 5G FWA by December
Doubling Broadband User Base
"During the quarter, we accelerated our FWA expansion, which led to strong uptick in customer additions of 674K customers to reach to a total base of 9.2 million," the company stated in its Q3 FY25 performance report published on February 6, 2025.
"Broadband penetration in the country remains low, but is growing rapidly driven by fast paced adoption of home connectivity and changing content consumption preference of customers," Gopal Vittal of Bharti Airtel told analysts during the company's earnings call last Friday. "We believe the current market can double from over 45 million to any where between 80 to 90 million homes over the medium term. While we have stepped up our performance, we believe there is significant room to increase our competitiveness."
Fully Completed Testing 5G SA FWA
During its previous earnings call, Bharti Airtel's management highlighted that the company was testing its 5G SA FWA solution and expected it to be ready by December 2024. Now, the company has provided an update, stating that it has completed testing and is fully prepared to activate the solution whenever needed.
According to Vittal, 1,000 customers have already been using and testing the 5G SA FWA solution for the past 3–4 months. The company can simply "flip a switch" to transition its FWA users to SA if required, as "the whole network is fully ready."
Also Read: Airtel to Expand 5G in Rural Areas with Cost-Effective Spectrum Strategy: Report
5G SA Uplink Performance
For now, Airtel is delivering FWA services using its NSA (Non-Standalone) architecture. Vittal noted that the network is currently empty, and when 5G starts experiencing congestion—something that is still a long way off—Airtel will activate the 5G SA FWA solution. However, he clarified that the belief that 5G SA provides greater coverage for FWA than NSA is a myth.
"That is just not true," he said in response to an analyst's question on network coverage for FWA using 5G SA. While SA could be beneficial in delivering better uplink speeds when networks become congested, with the current low utilisation, there is not much difference between 5G SA and NSA in terms of FWA performance, according to the CEO.
Airtel's home broadband business reported strong revenue growth of 18.7 percent year-on-year in Q3.
