Hyderabad/New Delhi: Bharti Airtel on Thursday announced its network is 5G-ready as it tested the fifth generation (5G) service over a commercial network in Hyderabad.
The trial puts in focus the company’s technology capabilities for rolling out of 5G services in future.
Airtel said the actual impact of 5G experience will be available to customers “when adequate spectrum is available and government nods are received”.
For the demo, Airtel, which is the first operator to demonstrate this capability, leveraged existing liberalized spectrum in the 1800MHz band.
“In many ways now, it is a flick of a button to turn on 5G. It is important that we get the right 5G experience for which adequate spectrum in the right bands need to be made available,” Bharti Airtel MD and CEO Gopal Vittal said at the virtual conference.
“Even on existing bands of spectrum, 5G can be turned on but the full power of the experience will be felt only when adequate spectrum is available from the government,” Vittal said.
The company said Airtel 5G can deliver 10X speeds, 10X latency and 100X concurrency when compared to existing technologies.
In Hyderabad, users with a 5G phone could download a full-length movie in a matter of seconds.
Airtel used dynamic spectrum sharing to seamlessly operate 5G and 4G within the same spectrum block.
“Every single part of our network is fully 5G ready…and can use any spectrum band to click on 5G experience in a matter of months,” Vittal said.
The company had already demonstrated 5G capabilities in labs, where on a standalone mode it was able to deliver experiences of up to 3 Gbps.
Telecom firms are looking to tap 5G opportunities in India, a lucrative market with the second largest number of telephone connections.
Reliance Jio has said it will continue to accelerate the rollout of its digital platforms and indigenously developed next-generation 5G stack.
The company had said it will make 5G affordable, adding that its service would be a testimony to the vision of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’.
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