Vodafone Idea’s long awaited 5G launch targeted for March 2025

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The operator’s rivals, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio, both launched 5G services in 2022

This week, Vodafone Idea (Vi) has announced plans to launch commercial 5G services by March 2025.

The operator says its initial rollout will cover all metros and major cities in 17 of India’s 22 telecom circles (essentially licencing regions), beginning with Delhi and Mumbai.

Vi estimates the rollout will include the rollout of 5G equipment to 75,000 existing 4G sites over the next three years.

The news follows the announcement of multibillion dollar 4G and 5G equipment deals with Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung earlier this month.

Vi also noted that it continues to aggressively roll out 4G, aiming for 90% population coverage with 4G by June next year.

The operator’s existing 4G network covers roughly 77% of the population.

“We are not going to be too aggressive on 5G, we will go by case-to-case basis depending on how the 5G is growing, how the use cases and device penetration are happening,” said Vi’s chief technology officer Jagbir Singh.

Singh noted that 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) remains an exciting uses case for 5G, with Vi likely to launch a commercial 5G FWA offering “three to six months after the 5G launch”.

“This is a good use case right now, in absence of any other good use case to monetise 5G. We will also do it,” said Singh, noting that rivals Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel were both having significant success with their respective FWA services.

It is worth noting here, however, just how much of a 5G laggard Vi is compared to Airtel and Jio, both of which launched their own commercial 5G services in 2022. Jio already had 130 million 5G users as of August this year, having recently reached ‘nationwide coverage’. Airtel, similarly, is not far behind with roughly 90 million 5G subscribers.

Catching up to these figures will be a major challenge for cash strapped Vi. Knowing this, and with 5G revenues remaining relatively low across the sector, it should come as little surprise that the company is being relatively cautious in its expensive 5G rollout and instead trying to consolidate its position in 4G.

In related news, this week the Department of Telecoms (DoT) has reportedly drafted a Cabinet note proposing to eliminate bank guarantees for deferred spectrum payments.

If passed, this proposal would be a huge boon for Vi, which currently needs to provide the government with bank guarantees of almost $3 billion in the coming months, related to its spectrum repayments due next year.

Vi missed the first deadline to submit bank guarantees back in September and began petitioning the DoT to waive the bank guarantees shortly after.

Removing the need to secure these bank guarantees would significantly free up Vi’s cash flow for the following year and therefore have a major impact on the company’s 4G and 5G rollouts.

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