Bharti Airtel ended its first fiscal quarter of 2025 on June 30, with a total of 90 million 5G subscribers
Indian operator Bharti Airtel’s 5G network currently reaches 140,000 villages, while its 4G network coverage extends to 800,000 villages across India, according to local press reports.
The telco covers all 7,900 towns in India with both 5G and 4G technologies, according to a company presentation for investors made on September 17.
In a release, Bharti Airtel revealed it deployed 1,700 towers over the past seven months in the western state of Gujarat and added newly acquired spectrum across about half of India.
The telco noted the tower buildout “equates to a remarkable pace” of more than eight new sites installed per day, expanding coverage to some 5 million people. Gujarat is the fifth-largest state in India by area.
The operator ended June with about 324,500 towers across India, an increase of more than 40,000 from a year earlier. The number of base stations rose 11.1% to 947,377.
Bharti Airtel ended its first fiscal quarter of 2025 on June 30, with a total of 90 million 5G subscribers, Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel, said during a recent conference call with investors.
The executive noted that the company had ended the previous fiscal quarter with 72 million customers in the 5G field.
Bharti Airtel recently confirmed that it has started re-farming its existing mid-band spectrum with the main aim of accommodating the growing traffic demand on its 5G network.
To accommodate the growing number of customers migrating to its 5G network, Airtel said it is in the process of re-farming its mid-band spectrum to expand 5G services on its 1.8 GHz, 2.1 GHz and 2.3 GHz bands across India.
Finnish vendor Nokia recently said it has successfully completed its first 5G Non-Standalone cloud RAN trial with Bharti Airtel. The trial took place in an over-the-air environment utilizing 3.5 GHz spectrum for 5G and 2.1 GHz for 4G.
Nokia noted that data calls were successfully performed with commercial user devices over Airtel’s commercial network achieving a throughput of over 1.2 Gbps. The trial used Nokia’s RAN Software for virtualized Distributed Unit (vDU) and virtualized Centralized Unit (vCU) running on x86 Hardware with a CaaS layer.
Airtel is currently using equipment from Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung to provide 5G services. The Indian operator had secured a total of 19,800 megahertz of spectrum in the 900 MHz, 1.8 GHz, 2.1 GHz, 3.3 GHz and 26 GHz bands in a previous auction carried out by the Indian government in July 2022. In July 2024, the telco secured additional spectrum to expand its 5G offering.
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