Airtel to deploy FWA on SA network, full scale impact likely in FY2Q: Gopal Vittal
Bharti Airtel has said that the full-scale impact of its deployment of fixed wireless access (FWA) services, which has been deployed across 25 cities so far, will start to show in the second quarter of the current fiscal year which started in April.
Airtel’s FWA deployment will happen over standalone architecture (SA), similar to larger rival Reliance Jio, unlike its cellular 5G deployment which happened over non-standalone architecture (NSA), managing director Gopal Vittal said during its recent earnings call.
Fixed wireless access (FWA) is being seen as the crucial first use case in 5G that will enable telcos like Airtel and Jio to monetise the huge investments made on deployment of the technology, amidst telcos offering unlimited 5G speeds to mobile phone users.
“On SA deployment, we currently got a pilot going on in one state in the country, and we are extending this to another circle as well. There are a lot of trials that are happening to see how this will work out and like I said, I think the midband holdings are really a big and very, very priceless part of the overall SA strategy which is 1800-2100 MHz band,” Vittal said.
While Jio has been rolling out the 5G network on a standalone (SA) basis, Airtel is doing it on the non-standalone (NSA) mode. In SA mode, the whole 5G network is rolled out afresh, which involves higher opex and capex than the NSA mode in which the existing 4G network layer is also utilised.
Jio has reported 108 million 5G subscribers as of March 2024, by which time Airtel’s user
