Airtel, Jio turn focus to wireless home 5G for better monetisation
Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio have ramped up efforts to expand their fixed wireless access (FWA) offerings to provide home broadband services, which is helping them monetise 5G airwaves and boost data usage.
The strategy to offer 5G on standalone (SA) technology for FWA helps the telcos reduce dependency on capital-intensive fibre deployments to offer home broadband services in the near-term, analysts said.
The 5G on SA technology is a pureplay 5G network, while 5G non-standalone (NSA) technology — which Airtel uses for speedy deployment of pan-India 5G mobile services — entails a lesser investment as it leverages the existing 4G mobile infrastructure, they said.
«To address the immediate growth of data consumption over home connections, Bharti (Airtel) has adopted the strategy to offer 5G on a standalone basis through network slicing,» said Balaji Subramanian, vice president at equity research firm IIFL Securities.
«Fibre rollouts are expensive and time consuming. It also involves large investments in areas like Mumbai where RoW (right of way) permissions are awarded at a cost as high as Rs 1 crore per kilometre, and therefore, need a long time to generate returns,» Subramanian said. «Besides, the stronghold of local internet service providers in tier-1 and metro markets is also difficult to challenge,» he said, adding that FWA can help the telco to overcome these hurdles in the near term.
Airtel is in direct competition with Jio that currently leads in the home connectivity segment, with nearly 12 million
