Vodafone Idea is planning to roll out its 5G services in December and expects around 45-50 million users shifting to the network. The company is looking to deploy 75,000 5G sites over the next three years, said Jagbir Singh, chief technology officer, Vodafone Idea.
The telecom company is riding on its recent fundraise and the Rs 30,000-crore deal with Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung for supply of 4G and 5G network equipment.
Singh said since 5G monetisation is currently seen on the 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband service, Vodafone Idea is targeting to launch Vi AirFiber by next year, for which it has been doing trials with its vendor partners.
On Tuesday, Aditya Birla group chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla had exuded confidence about Vodafone Idea scripting a turnaround with its recent fundraise and capex cycle. He said that the company is on a more secure footing and remains dynamic and competitive, and with government’s continued support, the company will do its part in realising India’s digital destiny.
“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,” Singh said, adding that the company will first roll out the services in big cities to tap a high Arpu (average revenue per user) base.
Notably, the 75,000 5G sites will be in co-location with 4G. Separately, the company is looking to add 45,000 4G sites, in addition to the existing 180,000 sites.
Vodafone Idea has given a Rs 55,000-crore capital expenditure (capex) guidance over the next three years to expand the 4G population coverage, from 1.03 billion to 1.2 billion, and launch 5G in key markets.
On the commercial deployment of FWA, Singh said, “This is a good use case right now, in absence of any other good use case to monetise 5G. We will also do it. It could be 3-6 months after the 5G launch.”
Peers Airtel and Jio have started commercial deployment of 5G FWA and are seeing good traction for it. In the July-September earnings, Jio talked about having 2.8 million connected homes by JioAirFiber as of September end.
Currently, Jio has been deploying 5G on a standalone architecture (SA), which means its mobile architecture is not dependent on 4G, unlike in non-standalone (NSA) technology framework. However, for enterprise use cases, private 5G networks, etc, SA is seen to have an edge.
“How many private networks are there in the country today? We will see when the use case comes for the standalone and then we will also look at the strategy to migrate,” Singh said, adding that the NSA architecture has a lot of benefits as it complements 4G.
According to Singh, despite the lack of use cases and monetisation for 5G, Vodafone Idea would still be doing the required roll out of services looking at the customers who would start comparing the services one day because the competition has launched 5G.
On the enterprise side, private networks were expected to be the major use case – having a captive network in ports, for mining, for factories, etc.
“The affordability to pay the price for the 5G private network by enterprise is still not there. The reason why it is not picking up is because the enterprises are not seeing the benefits. Even for consumers on the device, there’s no use case where you need more than 4-6 Mbps. So, it’s a combination of many things,” Singh said.
When asked about the deployment of open-RAN (radio access network) technology, Singh said, “It’s still too mature technically. Commercially, it is not cheap or in the sense not even as good as the classical RAN. It is more expensive.”
The company has been doing trials for the Open-RAN technology for the last two-three years with companies like Mavenir. However, the technology has not been able to offer higher scalability, less costs and seamless support with the multi-vendor approach.
“The day it becomes techno commercially viable, we will be ready for it,” Singh said, adding the company could use Open-RAN for replacing Chinese equipment over the next 2-3 years if the technology gets ripe and offers benefits.
When asked about the launch of an AI spam detection solution launched by Airtel, Singh said Vodafone Idea has been doing it on the SMS side by not allowing spam messages to get delivered to customers.
“We are working on the spam voice (call) solution, and may have it in the next three to four months,” Singh said.
The company currently claims to block 15 million spam SMS per month.
Vodafone has about 8,000 MHz of spectrum in its portfolio at the moment. The company says its portfolio is good as lower data traffic at the moment on the network compared to peers, gives it room to grow business customers and provide quality services.
that such airwaves will be given out through administrative allocation and not auctioned.
Vodafone Idea plans 5G rollout in December: Looks to deploy 75,000 sites over next 3 years