LightCounting & TÉRAL RESEARCH: India RAN market is buoyant with 5G rolling out at a fast pace

Posted on by Alan Weissberger

The India Wireless Infrastructure Report provides an update on the 5G radio access (RAN) developments in India, including geopolitics trends and technology.  The report says that The RAN market in India is buoyant with a swelling local ecosystem that boasts big international ambitions.

Reliance Jio is rolling out 5G at a fast pace, followed by Bharti Airtel. As a result,1H23 RAN sales surged 300% YoY, and kept Ericsson in the driver’s seat, followed by Nokia and Samsung. Although the rollout pace has slowed down, 2023 is looking up, looks like the peak year, and we expect RAN equipment sales to more than double compared to last year, still driven by Jio and Airtel while BSNL will contribute with its 4G deployment.

“It’s a two-horse race, the near Jio / Airtel duopoly is quickly blanketing the country with 5G while the rest are struggling and catching up with 4G.” said Stéphane Téral, Chief Analyst at LightCounting Market Research and Founder of TÉRAL RESEARCH.

Source:  LightCounting

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Major findings in this very first edition of the India Wireless Infrastructure report are:
  • 2024 is shaping up as a shift year from 5G network buildout to how to foster utilization and some midband FWA experiments.
  • Due to the looming formation of a CSP duopoly, the looming merger of MTNL into BSNL, and Vodafone Idea’s unsustainable indebtment, our long-term forecast points to a lumpy RAN market. There is no surprise that India is a tough cellular market characterized by flat subscriber growth, ultralow ARPUs and low equipment average sales pricing.
  • Open RAN is the brightest spot with a penetration of the total RAN market that will surpass 50% by 2028.
  • At the same time, a mushrooming energetic local ecosystem is rising with great international ambitions enabled by strong ties between the U.S. and India.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

About the report:
India Wireless Infrastructure report focuses on 5G developments in India, including traditional 4G and 5G RAN and open vRAN, geopolitics trends, Indian ecosystem, and technology. This report also includes cellular subscribers data by CSP, 4G and 5G BTS units and sales, a 5-year forecast for eNBs, gNBs, vCUs, vDUs, RUs, and RAN vendor market shares and analysis.  More information about the report is available at www.lightcounting.com
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
LightCounting also published a September 2023 Open vRAN Market report. That report takes a deep dive into the virtualization and disaggregation of radio access networks and analyzes the various schools of thoughts ranging from basic virtualization of RAN functions (vRAN) to new open architectures such as open RAN, following the TIP initiative and the O-RAN Alliance specifications, designed to cut the dependency on proprietary RAN equipment supplied by the traditional vendors.
The vRAN segment is taken from the firm’s existing RAN size and forecasts and broken down by 2G/3G/4G versus 5G, as well as by vCU/vDU and RU for each region, and also looks at the potential for indoor DAS replacement. The report covers a wide emerging ecosystem of vendors.

References:

https://www.lightcounting.com/report/september-2023-india-wireless-infrastructure-217

https://www.lightcounting.com/report/september-2023-open-vran-market-213

Reliance Jio in talks with Tesla to deploy private 5G network for the latter’s manufacturing plant in India

OTT players in India struggle in telco partnerships

Communications Minister: India to be major telecom technology exporter in 3 years with its 4G/5G technology stack

India to set up 100 labs for developing 5G apps, business models and use-cases

Adani Group to launch private 5G network services in India this year

2 thoughts on “LightCounting & TÉRAL RESEARCH: India RAN market is buoyant with 5G rolling out at a fast pace”

  1. Bharti Airtel today announced that it has surpassed 50 million unique 5G customers on its network. Airtel was the first to launch 5G services in India on October 1st, 2022, with the Airtel 5G Plus network first going live in eight cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Siliguri, Nagpur, and Varanasi. As tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of 5G services in India, Airtel has announced that its 5G growth streak continues, along with the 5G user milestone.

    Airtel announced that it has reached this milestone within one year of the launch of Airtel 5G Plus. Airtel said that Airtel 5G Plus is available across all 28 states and 8 union territories, making it one of the fastest rollouts in the country. The company has taken initiatives to launch 5G services in many tourist destinations and is also the first to launch 5G service to customers across Kochi’s water metro stations.

    From the scenic Balia in Bihar to the historic Cuttack in Odisha, the smallest Ramgarh district in Jharkhand to Bishnoi, a land for wildlife lovers in Rajasthan, from the serene Serai of Kerala to the marshy villages of Kashmir, Airtel said its customers are now on the digital superhighway and are enjoying blazing fast speeds on its 5G network.

    https://telecomtalk.info/airtel-surpasses-50million-unique-5g-users-india/880132/

  2. India talks up 6G, when its own TSDSI 5Gi has been a commercial failure, despite being included in the ONLY TRUE 5G standard ITU-R M.2150. Annex 3 (page 268 of ITU-R M.2150-2) is a Specification of the 5Gi radio interface technology. It contains the detailed information developed by the ITU and “TSDSI” (the GCS Proponent and Transposing Organizations). Yet not a single Indian telco has implemented TSDI 5Gi Radio Interface Technology (RIT)!

    TSDSI RIT is a versatile radio interface that fulfils all the technical performance requirements of IMT 2020 across all the different test environments. This RIT focuses on connecting the next generation of devices and providing services across various sectors. In particular, this RIT focuses on: Enhanced spectral efficiency and broadband access; Low latency communication; Support millions of IOT devices; Power efficiency; High speed connectivity; Large Coverage (in particular for Rural areas); Support multiple frequency bands including mm Wave spectrum. While, the current specifications provide a robust RIT, the specification also provides a framework for which future enhancements can be supported, providing a future-proof technology. In the following sections, we provide a basic description of the RIT. The complete details of the RIT can be found in the specification documents.

    Reference: Recommendation ITU-R M.2150-2 (12/2023)

Comments are closed.

Archives