Bharti Airtel announces 5G ready network in Hyderabad

Bharti Airtel on Thursday announced that it had become the country’s first telecom operator to demonstrate and orchestrate 5G services over a commercial network in Hyderabad.

The telecom giant said that it implemented its 5G service over its existing liberalised spectrum in the 1800 MHz band through the NSA (Non-Stand Alone) network technology. It used a first of its kind, dynamic spectrum sharing, to operate 5G and 4G networks concurrently and seamlessly within the same spectrum block.

The company used Ericsson’s 4G (DSS) radio infrastructure and the Oppo Reno 5 Pro and the Oppo Find X2 Pro smartphones to test its 5G services in the city.

Airtel says that this demonstration has emphatically validated the 5G readiness of Airtel’s network across all domains - Radio, Core and Transport.

As far as the details of its test run are concerned, Airtel said that its 5G network is capable of delivering 10x speeds, 10x latency and 100x concurrency when compared to existing technologies. Specifically, in Hyderabad, users were able to download a full-length movie in a matter of seconds on a 5G phone.

The company said that if permitted by the authorities, Airtel customers can start experiencing 5G networks in India in a matter of months. It also said that over 20 commercially available 5G smartphones in India will be ready for its 5G network.

“I am very proud of our engineers who have worked tirelessly to showcase this incredible capability in Tech City, Hyderabad today...We believe India has the potential to become a global hub for 5G innovation. To make that happen we need the ecosystem to come together – applications, devices and network innovation. We are more than ready to do our bit,” Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO, Bharti Airtel said on the occasion.

It is worth mentioning that Bharti Airtel is not the only company in India that has taken steps towards deploying 5G networks in India. At RIL’s AGM last year, company chairman Mukesh Ambani unveiled a roadmap of how Reliance Jio would implement 5G services in India. At the time, he had said that his company had created a 5G solution from scratch and that it used 100% homegrown technologies and solutions.

More recently, Ambani doubled down on his promise of offering 5G services in India by starting the advance tests to prepare the fifth-generation, high-speed network in the country.