The move contrasts with Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, which are pushing aggressively into FWA to grow their home broadband businesses and drive revenues. Jio recently claimed that its Unlicensed Band Radio (UBR)-based FWA solution is better than fiber. Vi executives said the company continues to run pilots and will finalise its strategy based on customer feedback.
“Vi has been exploring an FWA launch but then decided to focus solely on 5G for mobiles because that’s where they want to ensure more 4G or 2G users migrate to 5G. For a better FWA experience, they will need standalone 5G, which is not part of their rollout plan,” a source was quoted as saying.
According to the report, a company spokesperson added that Vi is currently running a pilot and will finalise its launch strategy based on pilot results and customer feedback.
“Unlike our competitors, we don’t have a strong fixed-line broadband presence. Since companies like Airtel and Jio have extensive fibre networks, FWA complements their strategy. However, we are conducting trials and evaluating the business case for FWA,” Singh had said, according to the report.
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According to Ashwinder Sethi, partner at Analysys Mason, FWA is typically more relevant in suburban and rural areas with limited FTTx coverage. However, Vi’s short-to-medium-term 5G deployment will focus on metro and urban areas, where demand for enhanced mobile broadband on handsets is higher. “Thus, the lack of rural coverage as well as potential 5G FWA capex in case of traffic growth leading to capacity sites, could be the reason why Vi is not bullish on FWA,” Sethi was quoted as saying regarding Vi’s decision to focus on 5G for mobile users.
Also Read: Jio 5G FWA Stack Sees Global Interest After India Scale-Up; Jio Private 5G Powering Industry 5.0
Jio’s Claims on UBR
Meanwhile, Jio and Airtel continue to leverage their FWA and fiber offerings for home broadband. Jio’s AirFiber service, supported by its proprietary UBR technology, has already made the company the world’s largest FWA provider, adding close to one million homes a month.
According to the report, Jio argues that relying only on 5G and fibre has limits: 5G networks are crowded with mobile users, spectrum is scarce and expensive, and fibre is vulnerable to physical damage. UBR, which utilises the unlicensed 5GHz Wi-Fi band, provides Jio with a faster and more cost-effective alternative to the 3.6GHz licensed spectrum currently employed in 5G FWA.
PwC’s Take
Vinish Bawa, TMT head at PwC, was quoted as saying that FWA in India is shifting from being just an access solution to a mainstream broadband alternative. Operators are driving adoption in fibre-dark regions while investing in spectrum efficiency and network densification to sustain quality of service.
“With low ARPUs and rising household data consumption, telcos are moving beyond cheap, unlimited data—pivoting instead to tiered plans, bundled content, and SME/enterprise-led monetisation to ensure FWA’s long-term viability,” Bawa reportedly said. “The opportunity ahead for telcos lies in a differentiated play: targeting underserved clusters, building a hybrid model with fibre partnerships, and positioning FWA as a platform for MSMEs and 5G-led enterprise use cases, rather than just a stop-gap.”
Market Trends and FWA Subscriber Growth
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) data shows 5G FWA subscribers rose to 8.4 million by July 2025, up from 7.85 million a month earlier. The total FWA subscriber base (excluding UBR) stood at 7.9 million, up 0.45 million month-on-month, the report said. Jio accounted for 6.1 million users with a 77.8 percent share, while Airtel held 1.7 million, or 22.2 percent.
In the 5G FWA segment (excluding UBR), Jio added 0.34 million subscribers in July, maintaining its leadership with a 76.7 percent market share. Bharti Airtel added 0.21 million subscribers, taking its share to around 23.3 percent at the end of July 2025. In the FTTH and UBR sub-segment, Jio posted strong FTTH additions of 0.59 million in July, supported by rollouts on UBR technology, while Bharti Airtel recorded steady FTTH growth with 0.14 million additions, according to JM Financial’s analysis of TRAI’s July data, the report highlighted.
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Analysts believe FWA can accelerate broadband penetration in fibre-dark regions due to its lower rollout costs and faster deployment. However, they caution that increasing user density could strain spectrum resources and impact service quality.
FWA’s Low-cost Model Cannot Serve Scale
“Telcos should target investments in spectrum efficiency, small-cell densification, and traffic optimisation to sustain quality of service in the future. In India’s ARPU-constrained market, FWA’s low-cost model cannot serve increasingly data-hungry households at scale. Its unit economics weaken quickly in high-usage zones. Telcos must pivot from a pure volume game to value-led monetisation. Tiered plans, convergence with content and cloud, and enterprise use cases will be critical to building viable unit economics over time,” Bawa reportedly said.
Bawa also noted that FWA should not be seen only as a residential solution. It can unlock agility for MSMEs, gig economy hubs, pop-up retail, and temporary enterprise sites. Combined with 5G and edge computing, it can enable high-performance, location-flexible operations.
“Telcos should treat FWA as a strategic platform, not just a stop-gap, to build a differentiated market position,” said Vinish Bawa, as mentioned in the report.
According to the Moneycontrol report, Airtel has not yet disclosed plans to deploy UBR for broadband.
Airtel Bets on Fiber-First Strategy
However, during the earnings webinar for the quarter ended June 30, 2025, Bharti Airtel Vice Chairman and Managing Director Gopal Vittal responded to a question about UBR services, explaining that UBR relies on the Wi-Fi band, which suffers from high interference, resulting in a poor experience.
“On UBR, just to give you a little bit of colour on this, UBR it is really using the Wi-Fi band to provide connectivity. This is used in the B2B space through the IWAN, sort of, links that get provided. One of the challenges particularly in dense urban areas is there is a very high degree of interference and that happens in the Wi-Fi band so even if you have interference mitigating solutions, you end up with high churn and you end up with poor experience. Where the density of the customer base is very low on fixed broadband, UBR could definitely work, so we have done a lot of trials with this UBR piece and we will see where to deploy it if we have to but it will certainly not be in dense server,” Gopal Vittal explained.
“The second point I would make is that we have already got a 5G investment that has played out in mobile and fixed wireless access is just a topping on the cake. So it does not require any incremental capex on the radio side and you can use that to monetize the investment. So that is an area of focus but I would continue to underscore that actually the best way to connect to home is through fiber. So our focus is to actually step up more and more fiber home passes, which I mentioned and we are actually glad that in the last three months of this first quarter of this year, our fiber homes that we are connecting through fiber has actually ratcheted up growth. So if you take the total Wi-Fi number of 939,000 fiber is actually pushing ahead with very, very fast growth and FWA complements, so that is really how we think of UBR and the delivery mediums,” Vittal said, stressing the company’s commitment to fiber and investments already made in 5G.
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