Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, two top Indian telecom operators, have a great opportunity to benefit from the 5G FWA rollout. The telcos have already launched the FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) service in some parts of the country. Qualcomm believes that if Jio and Airtel were to leverage their mmWave spectrum holdings, then they have a huge potential to increase revenues and monetise 5G. Both telcos have already tested their 5 G-based FWA services on the 26 GHz spectrum and the results were encouraging.
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The benefit of offering mmWave 5G-based FWA service is that the telcos won't have to spend money in deploying fiber in all parts to offer high-speed broadband connectivity. They can simply offer 5G FWA services and monetise 5G. The only thing that the telcos will have to pay for is the installation and the customer premise equipment (CPE), something they can recover from the customers.
According to an ET report, speaking on Day 1 of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit 2023 in Hawaii, an executive from Qualcomm Technologies said that 5G FWA running on mmWave spectrum is a hit in countries such as the US and Japan. Further, it is witnessing good traction in South East Asian and Latin American markets as it is a new 5G use case promising great revenue opportunities for the telcos.
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For fiber-based home broadband services, the customer has to wait for an internet service provider (ISP) to first deploy fiber in their year. This could mean a wait time of multiple years for some people. But with 5G FWA, no wait time is required. The telcos can directly offer the 5G FWA box to the customer to connect their homes with high-broadband access.
Currently, the Indian telcos are offering 5G FWA in select cities. As they roll out 5G to more cities and reach their milestone of greater coverage, they will likely announce 5G FWA in more cities by the end of 2023.
