In the first half of 2024, Jio hopes to have AirFiber coverage over all of India. Rival carrier Bharti Airtel also intends to go beyond 25 cities with its cellular high-speed internet offerings.
Customers in India may anticipate improved 5G performance at home because to the expansion of wireless high-speed internet services being offered by competing companies Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel.
The top two telecom companies in India based on market share want to aggressively target the residential and business broadband market by expanding fixed wireless access (FWA) in the next quarters.
The two businesses would be able to start making money off of their investment with the aid of the 5G FWA expansion.
During the Q4 results call, Jio said that it hopes to have its 5G FWA service, JioAirFiber, available across all of India by the first half of 2024.
Rival Bharti Airtel intends to go over 25 cities and is also stepping up.
Since FWA doesn't need fiber and gives comparable speed, it is simpler to implement. It makes use of wireless devices that function similarly to tiny cell towers. When telcos are unable to provide fiber services in a certain location, they will provide FWA.
Jio and Airtel did not respond to inquiries.
With the help of its excellent 5G standalone (SA) architecture, Jio provides FWA in 5,900 cities and municipalities. In order to launch its FWA services, Airtel has also started to move to stand-alone (SA) mode, the Sunil Mittal-led business said during a recent results conference with investors.
"We are now doing a pilot on the SA deployment in one state in the nation. We're going to expand this to include yet another circle. Many trials are being conducted to see how this will turn out. According to Gopal Vittal, managing director of Airtel, "the mid-band holdings are really a big as well as very, very priceless part of the overall SA strategy" during the call.
Any underlying layer, such a 4G network, is not necessary for the stand-alone technology to function. Jio's use of SA to launch 5G made it simpler to implement FWA in additional places since it provided the necessary coverage.
4G is compatible with non-stand-alone (NSA) technology. Airtel uses NSA, a more affordable but less advanced kind of 5G. It is now moving to South Africa.
Slow FWA implementation by Airtel
Vittal blamed the worldwide availability of consumer premise equipment (CPE) devices for the delayed FWA launch.
The global availability of CPEs is the reason it is taking FWA longer to grow. A portion of it is coming in as we talk.You ought to see the full effect of fixed wireless access in the second quarter. We are now preparing to ensure that this happens at a faster rate," he said.
CPEs are IT and telecommunications devices, such as DSL routers and phone handsets, that are stored at the customer's site.
Jio Platforms President Kiran Thomas said on the Q4 call in April that the company, which debuted its FWA service in September 2023, is now seeing a significant surge in demand from Tier 2 and Tier 3 areas.
Jio's AirFiber is sold to retail customers as an entertainment-focused package that includes internet access. Along with its connection services, the firm also offers it to small companies in packages that include managed Wi-Fi, cloud computing, and IoT monitoring.
In order to serve clients in areas where installing optical fiber for residential broadband is challenging and time-consuming, both businesses use FWA services. According to them, FWA will enhance their fiber-based internet offering.
37 million users of FWA by 2028
According to experts, fiber technology may achieve speeds equivalent to those of FWA, one of the earliest well-known 5G use cases in India, and it has gained significant traction worldwide.
Ashwinder Sethi, a partner at the telecom and technology consulting company Analysys Mason, told Moneycontrol that "even though fiber requires an upfront investment, FWA spending are less lumpy as they could utilise unused capacity on mobile networks and consequently offer better cashflows than fibre broadband."
Jio and Airtel are anticipated to deploy FWA to close the gap after the rapid rollout of fiber to households and businesses in metropolitan regions, with a focus on sub-urban and rural areas, according to Sethi.
According to market research company Mandala Insights, there will be 36.6 million FWA connections in India by the end of 2028, up from 308,000 in 2023.
Most of them will operate on 5G sub-6 GHz spectrum frequencies, with mmWave starting to gain popularity in 2025.
Right now, FWA is the only 5G use case that has been shown to be profitable. The US is the finest example, since there are a lot of FWA users there, both in the consumer and increasingly in the corporate segments. In the US right now, fixed wireless access is expanding much more slowly than fixed broadband, according to Mandala Insights founder and lead analyst Shiv Putcha.
Although the initial cost of 5G FWA is comparable to that of fiber to the house (FTTH), adoption and profitability are yet unknown since 5G FWA is still in its infancy in India.
5G provides very fast internet rates, allowing users to download movies and play games on the cloud more quickly.
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