Airtel to Migrate to Standalone 5G FWA by December

Bharti Airtel plans to shift to Standalone (SA) 5G for Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) by December 2024. The company is currently conducting trials to test if SA can achieve better uplink performance for FWA, as it operates over a static network, said Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO of Bharti Airtel Limited, during the company’s recent earnings webinar. Vittal highlighted that for mobile services, the decision to switch from NSA to SA 5G depends on the load on spectrum bands. As more spectrum becomes available, Airtel can allocate more bandwidth to 5G and eventually transition to a fully standalone network. This shift, however, will take three to four years.

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Standalone 5G Use Cases

Vittal explained that Airtel can enable certain use cases with standalone 5G, even if not across the entire network. For example, the company already serves some enterprise clients on standalone networks. Fixed wireless access is a good use case. We believe standalone networks will improve uplink performance, although this hypothesis needs testing. SA networks also allow for network slicing as mobile traffic grows.

“Fixed wireless access is a good use case, where the hypothesis is that if we use a standalone network, we will have better uplink performance. That hypothesis needs to be proven and tested. It will also provide the capacity to slice the network for standalone as mobile traffic builds up,” he explained.

Airtel Hybrid 5G Approach

Referring to the US, where companies like T-Mobile operate both SA and NSA networks, Vittal said Airtel could adopt a similar hybrid approach. “It’s just software,” he explained. “The radios and baseband units are the same. You just need a standalone core and the software to steer specific use cases or areas onto the standalone network.”