Today, in a virtual press conference announced that it has become the country’s first telecom company to successfully demonstrate and orchestrate LIVE 5G service over a commercial network in Hyderabad city. Few days back, Reliance Jio has already announced that they are testing 5G network in India, but both company hasn’t shared any launch date with us as of now. Airtel has upgraded its network capabilities using Ericsson hardware manufactured in India, and now Airtel can launch 5G services without the mid-band with the help of existing 4G spectrum bands, but company will like to wait for Spectrum allocation.
Airtel did this over its existing liberalized spectrum in the 1800 MHz band through the NSA (Non Stand Alone) network technology. Using a first of its kind, dynamic spectrum sharing, Airtel seamlessly operated 5G and 4G concurrently within the same spectrum block. This demonstration has emphatically validated the 5G readiness of Airtel’s network across all domains – Radio, Core and Transport.
As per the company, Airtel 5G is capable of delivering 10x speeds, 10x latency and 100x concurrency when compared to existing technologies. In Hyderabad, users were able to download a full length movie in a matter of seconds on a 5G phone.
The full impact of the 5G experience, however, will be available to our customers, when adequate spectrum is available and government allocates mid-band spectrum (2.5-3.7 GHz) for the new networks.
Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO, Bharti Airtel said: “I am very proud of our engineers who have worked tirelessly to showcase this incredible capability in Tech City, Hyderabad today. Every one of our investments is future proofed as this game changing test in Hyderabad proves. With Airtel being the first operator to demonstrate this capability, we have shown again that we have always been the first in India to pioneer new technologies in our quest for empowering Indians everywhere.”
