Faster 5G for homes as Jio, Airtel bet big on expanding FWA broadband

Jio and Airtel 's 5G FWA plans

India consumers can look forward to a better 5G experience at home, with Reliance Jio and rival Bharti Airtel set to expand their wireless high-speed broadband services.

India’s top two telecom operators by market share are planning to broaden fixed wireless access (FWA) in the coming quarters to aggressively tap the home and enterprise broadband segment.

The 5G FWA expansion would help the two companies take initial steps toward monetising their investment.

Jio aims to achieve pan-India coverage for its 5G FWA service — JioAirFiber — within the first half of 2024, the company said during the Q4 earnings call.

Rival Bharti Airtel is also ramping up and plans to expand beyond 25 cities.

FWA, which uses wireless devices that act like miniature cell towers, is easier to deploy as it doesn’t require fibre but offers similar speed. In areas where telcos can’t have fibre services, they will offer FWA.

Queries sent to Jio and Airtel remained unanswered.

Jio, leveraging its superior 5G standalone (SA) architecture, offers FWA in 5,900 cities and towns. Airtel, too, has begun transitioning to stand-alone (SA) mode to roll out its FWA services, the Sunil Mittal-led company said in a recent earnings call with analysts.

“On the SA deployment, we have currently got a pilot going on in one state in the country. We're extending this to another circle as well. There are a lot of trials that are happening to see how this will work out. The mid-band holdings are really a big and very, very priceless part of the overall SA strategy,” Airtel managing director Gopal Vittal said during the call.

The stand-alone technology works independent of any underlying layer such as a 4G network. As Jio launched 5G using SA, it was easier to deploy FWA in more cities as it had the required coverage.

Non–stand-alone (NSA) technology works with 4G. Airtel relies on NSA, which is a cost-efficient but toned-down version of 5G. It is now making the move to SA.

Airtel’s slow FWA rollout

Vittal attributed the slow FWA rollout to the global supply of consumer premise equipment (CPE) devices.

“The reason for FWA to take time to scale is the supplies of the CPEs from across the world. Some of it is flowing in as we speak…in Quarter Two, you should see the full-scale impact of fixed wireless access. As of now, we are gearing up to make sure that the velocity of this increases,” he said.

CPEs are telecommunications and IT equipment such as telephone handsets and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) routers kept at the customer's location.

Jio launched its FWA service in September 2023 and is now seeing a strong demand from Tier 2 and 3 towns, Kiran Thomas, president at Jio Platforms, said during the Q4 call in April.

Jio’s AirFiber is packaged as an entertainment-first product, bundled with broadband connectivity for retail consumers. The company is also offering it to small businesses bundled with various digital solutions like managed Wi-Fi, cloud computing and IoT surveillance with its connectivity services.

Both companies are using FWA services to reach customers where deploying optical fibre for home broadband is difficult and time-consuming. They have said FWA will complement their fibre broadband service.

37 million FWA users by 2028

FWA, one of the first prominent 5G use cases in India, can offer speeds comparable to fibre technologies and has taken off in a big way globally, analysts said.

“While fibre requires an upfront investment, FWA investments are less lumpy as they could utilise unused capacity on mobile networks and thus offer better cashflows than fibre broadband,” Ashwinder Sethi, partner at Analysys Mason, a telecom and technology consulting firm, told Moneycontrol.

After the aggressive rollout of fibre to homes and enterprises in urban areas, both Jio and Airtel are expected to use FWA to bridge the gap primarily in sub-urban and rural areas, Sethi said.

Market intelligence firm Mandala Insights expects FWA connections in India to rise from 308,000 in 2023 to 36.6 million by the end of 2028.

A majority of these will be on the sub-6 GHz 5G spectrum frequencies, with mmWave getting traction from 2025 onwards.

“FWA is the only proven monetizable use case for 5G at the moment. The best example is the US, which has seen a large number of FWA users, not only within the consumer segment but increasingly enterprise as well. FWA is growing much faster than fixed broadband in the US at present,” Shiv Putcha, founder and principal analyst at Mandala Insights said.

The launch price of FWA is quite similar to fibre to the home (FTTH) but adoption and monetisation remain to be seen, as these are still early days for 5G FWA in India.

5G offers ultra-high broadband speeds, enabling faster movie downloads and cloud gaming, etc for consumers.

Disclosure: Moneycontrol is a part of the Network18 group. Network18 is controlled by Independent Media Trust, of which Reliance Industries is the sole beneficiary.