Airtel’s 5G services to arrive in 300 cities in India by March 2023: Report

Bharti Airtel launched its 5G service, dubbed as Airtel 5G Plus, in India in October 2022 shortly after Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the service at India Mobile Congress 2022. Since then, the company has rolled out its 5G service in over 90 cities across the country and it is increasing this head count steadily. Now, a new report says that Airtel is targeting to make its 5G service available in 300 cities by March 2023.

Bharti Airtel Managing Director Gopal Vittal, while announcing the results for the third quarter of the year in an earnings call, said that Airtel is targeting to roll out its 5G Plus service in 300 cities by the end of March 2023. He also said that at the moment, the company is focusing on the areas where the demand for 4G services is already high to roll out its 5G services.

“We are already seeing traffic offloads happening from 4G to 5G in some areas, and this is where we will go with 5G,” Vittal said during the earnings call, as reported by The Economic Times Telecom.

Talking about Airtel’s 5G services in rural parts of the country, the Airtel India MD said that the availability of Airtel 5G Plus in smaller town and cities will depend on how fast the device ecosystem matures to upgrade from 4G to 5G devices. The company is also planning to expand the coverage of its services in around 60,000 villages across the country where the company is not present yet.

Furthermore, he said that the company had identified top 150 cities in the country that would make up to 40 percent of the Indian telecom market across segments and services such as mobile telephony, B2B use-cases, broadband and DTH to name a few.

It is worth noting that while Airtel has said that it will provide pan-India coverage of its 5G services by March 2024. Reliance Jio, the only other telecom operator that has rolled out its 5G services in India yet is targeting to provide its 5G services, dubbed as, True 5G, across the country by December 2023. So far, Jio has made its 5G services available in 236 cities across the country. You can check a detailed list here.