Bharti Airtel has taken a long approach to upgrade to the 5G SA (standalone) for its users. Firstly, the company will bring 5G SA for the FWA (fixed wireless access) users. This is because Airtel believes that 5G SA would have been an overkill to begin with as 5G NSA, which took less cost to deploy, was more than enough for the market. As market evolves and more 5G devices enter the ecosystem then Airtel will look at 5G SA transition for the mobile customers as well.
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The telco is not looking to invest too heavily into 5G as the tech hasn't really delivered the potential it was expected to. This was ecohed by Airtel's chief recently.
Airtel's Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Gopal Vittal, said during the recent earnings call for Q2 FY26, "one of the pain points in the telecom world across the globe is that 5G has not lived its promise of what it was meant to. The primary use case of 5G is only speed and now it is just a more efficient way of producing the same gigabyte, it is a more efficient way of doing it, but it has not led to any monetization, anywhere in the world."
The Indian telecom operators have primarily monetised 5G through the FWA services. As for the mobile customers, the telcos have used 5G as a bait for the users to recharge with higher priced plans. So while some level of monetisation has happened, it wouldn't really justify the ROI (return on investment) on 5G capex, which is in billions of dollars or thousands of crores.
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"There have been some experiments and some moves on standalone through slicing in some markets like the US and so on, but it is too small and to few and far between to make a meaningful difference to the overall monetization that was promised," added Vittal.
