Airtel 5G Plus reaches 50 million customers in one year, covers all districts in India

Bharti Airtel has announced that it has over 50 million unique 5G customers on its network. The company launched its Airtel 5G Plus service in October 2022 and has achieved this milestone in just one year, making it one of the fastest rollouts in the country. Airtel 5G Plus is available across all the 28 states and 8 union territories, covering all the districts in India, except for some areas in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Naxal-affected areas of Chhattisgarh and the islands of Lakshadweep, which are connected through VSAT.

Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel, said, “We are thrilled at the speed of adoption to 5G by millions of our customers and we are reaching this milestone earlier than planned. This marks a big expansion of Airtel’s 5G coverage going from 1 million in October of 2022 to 50 million in just 12 months of the launch. The expansion continues at full speed and I am sure, we will continue to rapidly multiply as we work towards nationwide coverage and enable all our customers to enter the 5G age.”

The telecom giant Airtel acquired spectrum worth Rs 43,084 crore in 19,867.8 MHz of bandwidth, while the struggling Vodafone Idea spent Rs 18,799 crore for 6,228 MHz of airwaves. A new player, Adani Data Networks, a subsidiary of the Adani Group, made small purchases of Rs 212 crore for 400 MHz of spectrum in six cities in the 26 GHz band only for its own private network requirements.

The Central government collected a record over Rs 1.5 lakh crore from the country’s first 5G spectrum auction, with Jio being the biggest bidder.

Airtel had boasted of being the “sole operator” to have 1 million unique customers on its 5G network in a month of its commercial launch. Later, in February 2023, the company led by Sunil Mittal announced that it had crossed the 10 million unique 5G user mark on its network.

Meanwhile, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani at the company’s recent annual general meeting stated, “Jio has over 50 million 5G customers. We are in a position to move our 4G customers seamlessly to 5G without incurring additional capital expenditure”.