Bharti Airtel preparing to increase 5G coverage, will compete with Reliance Jio
Bharti Airtel, one of the big telecom companies, plans to increase the coverage of 5G. For this, the company will refarm 4G spectrum in some of its existing bands. Bharti Airtel has also prepared to upgrade its existing 4G base stations for this. The company has also given big contracts to Nokia and Ericsson to upgrade the network.
According to a media report, Airtel has planned to refarm 4G spectrum in 2,300 Hz, 1,800 MHz and 900 Hz bands. The company uses non-standalone (NSA) architecture in which 5G network is installed on existing 4G coverage. Refarming means a process in which existing network bands which are not being used much or not at all are reallocated to support new technology. This strategy can be implemented in B and C circles. These circles include Punjab, Uttar Pradesh-East, Uttar Pradesh-West, Haryana, Kerala, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Northeast States, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh.
Recently, Airtel paid spectrum dues of Rs 3,626 crore to the Telecom Department. The company had bought this spectrum in 2016. Bharti Airtel had to pay an interest rate of more than eight percent for this outstanding amount. The company had said that it has paid spectrum dues of more than Rs 28,000 crore in this calendar year.
Bharti Airtel has rapidly expanded its 5G network. Recently, the company has given a contract worth millions of dollars to Finland’s telecom equipment maker Nokia. Nokia said that this deal includes using equipment from its 5G AirScale portfolio. Airtel plans to increase its coverage and capacity. For this, this contract has been given to Nokia. This also includes modernizing Airtel’s existing 4G network with multiband radios and baseband equipment. This equipment can also support 5G networks. Earlier this month, Airtel had said that more than 8 billion spam calls have been warned on its network. About two and a half months ago, the company implemented a solution related to artificial intelligence (AI) to deal with the problem of spam calls and messages.
