Airtel Rolls Out 5G Services In 8 Cities Today, Across India Launch By 2024

Telecom operator Bharti Airtel is set to roll out 5G services in 8 Indian cities today. In August, Bharti Airtel’s MD and CEO Gopal Vittal said that the telecom operator would roll out 5G services in that month. He further added that the company would cover every town and rural areas of India by March 2024.

According to a PTI report, Bharti Airtel’s chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said, “Bharti Airtel will today start 5G services in 8 cities of India. The telecom operator will cover the entire country by 2024.”

Earlier in September, Bharti Airtel entered the content delivery network (CDN) segment by rolling out Edge CDN. To use Edge CDN, the telecom operator also partnered with Qwilt, which enables CDN. 

Besides, Bharti Airtel along with other telecom operators participated in the auction of 5G spectrum worth INR 1.50 Lakh Cr. In the auction, Reliance Jio was the highest bidder with INR 88,078 Cr, followed by Bharti Airtel spending INR 43,084 Cr and Vodafone Idea (Vi) spending INR 18,799 Cr. 

In the auction, Bharti Airtel purchased 19.86 GHz spectrum while Reliance Jio and Vi purchased 24.74 GHz and 6.22 GHz spectrum respectively. 

In June, the telecom operator launched India’s first metaverse multiplex on the PartyNite platform. Meanwhile in April, it bought a 7% stake in cloud networking solutions provider Cnergee Technologies for an undisclosed amount.

The said acquisition was made to improve Airtel’s network-as-a-service (NaaS) services for small and medium sized enterprises that are planning to adopt cloud-based services and applications such as Dropbox, G Suite and Microsoft Office 365, among others. The deal will further enable Airtel to strengthen its ‘Work from Anywhere’ solutions as businesses are adopting hybrid work models following the pandemic.

The launch of 5G services will be extremely beneficial for the Indian startups working in diverse sectors including logistics, health, insurance, education, and finance. 

Some of the advantages of 5G services that will be borne by startups are enabling the full use of automation, providing 100 times faster speed than 4G, ability to work in harsh industrial environments and offering higher bandwidth connections, among others.