If you are thinking about shifting to 5G to get higher speeds as soon as it is available, hold that thought for a little. Reliance Jio has the most active customers overall, and that's why the telco's spectrum resources need to be vast to offer great 4G services. Almost every customer of Jio and other private telcos in India must have faced a situation of network congestion. Because the capacity is limited, sooner or later, there will be network congestion until and unless the load is reduced. Once 5G launches, we could see some of the traffic being offloaded to the 5G spectrum and 5G networks.
Jio is the only operator which will go for 5G SA (standalone) in India. With the 5G SA of Jio, there will be no need for the 4G network to keep the 5G network active. But with 5G NSA (non-standalone), things are slightly different. The more customers of Jio shift to 5G and the faster Jio rolls out 5G networks across the country, the lesser load will be on the 4G network of the telco. This should likely free up significant capacity of the 4G networks, which should reflect positively on the performance.
Will the Same Happen with 5G NSA?
I am not too clear on whether the same effect is there with 5G NSA, which requires a 4G core. Of course, the 5G spectrum would be different than the 4G spectrum, even in 5G NSA. Thus, it could be possible that as consumers connect with the 5G NSA network of a particular telco, the load on its 4G network capacity reduces.
Theoretically, the 4G speeds should improve as more customers shift to 5G. But then, 4G might become the sweet spot for many consumers if they start getting great 4G network services from the telcos across the nation. It will be some time before we can actually measure the performance gains in 4G post the launch of 5G. Indian telecom operators are gearing up to launch 5G services in October 2022.
