Bharti Airtel will adopt 5G Standalone (SA) technology in a phased manner, with a clear emphasis on ensuring optimal user experience rather than rushing into deployment for the sake of technology, according to Vice Chairman and Managing Director Gopal Vittal. Speaking during the company's Q4 FY2025 earnings call, Vittal said the transition to 5G SA will take place "at the right point in time," and will be guided by network readiness and customer demand.
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Airtel User Experience Over Technology
Airtel's strategy hinges on offloading a significant portion of 4G traffic onto its existing 5G networks before repurposing spectrum for SA deployment. "On the mobile side, it is very important that we offload the 4G traffic to 5G networks before we are in a position to refarm the spectrum and move to SA," Vittal said. He stressed that the choice between SA and NSA (Non-Standalone) should be driven by the quality of experience delivered, not by technology adoption for its own sake.
"The important thing to look at on whether it is SA or NSA is what is the experience that is being delivered," Vittal said.
Vittal highlighted Airtel's recent success in Opensignal's 5G experience awards, where the company emerged as the leader across all evaluated parameters nationwide. "Experience matters more to us than technology for the sake of technology," he noted.
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Fixed Wireless Access to Lead SA Adoption
The company is evaluating the use of SA initially for fixed wireless access (FWA) (Airtel AirFiber), where it can potentially enhance uplink performance. While current 5G networks remain underutilised, providing sufficient headroom for uplink, Airtel sees FWA as the logical first step in SA deployment, with mobile use cases to follow in due course.
"We are going to be prudent about where we actually deploy SA based on when we can offload the traffic. As far as fixed wireless access is concerned, there is an advantage in potentially using SA in order to improve the uplink performance and that is something that we are looking at," Vittal added.
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Current Network Performance
"You must know that at this point, our networks on 5G are pretty empty and so we have a lot of headroom for uplink, but at some point in time, probably the first port of call will be to move SA on fixed wireless access and then finally to get it to mobile," Vittal said in response to a question about Airtel's plans to transition to 5G SA.
Airtel Q4 FY2025 Metrics
As of the end of Q4 FY2025, Airtel reported an ARPU of Rs 245, 135 million 5G customers, 276.8 million mobile smartphone customers, 25.9 million postpaid mobile customers, and mobile data consumption per customer at 25.1 GB per month, with a total customer base of around 424 million.
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