Airtel 5G SA Approaching Roll out for Mobile users?

[Kyle Crane]

If Jio had fixed their problem of facing completely choked zones in busy areas
that would've made them the perfect telecom operator in India, since Jio's 5G did help to take load off their 4G network

Airtel would probably roll out 5G SA, especially for AirFiber

 

[Lucifer_King]

After One UI 7 update on my S23U, Im getting 5G VoNR toggle on my Airtel sim slot but as its not rolled out yet, VoNR is not working for Airtel

 

[SayantaN]

^ Airtel SA rollout slow as snail

 

[Kyle Crane]

I like how Airtel still claims 20 Gbps 5G

 

[akshay71]

@Kyle Crane Does Jio VoNR work for you? For me it switches to LTE during calls even after turning on the Voice over 5G Standalone toggle. It used to work briefly a year ago but stopped working abruptly. I placed call to customer care and got the basic “Have you rebooted your phone?” “Have you reset your network settings?”, followed by an email that we have fixed your issue. They didn’t specify exactly which issue they fixed ! Ofcourse nothing was fixed and my iPhone still switches to LTE during calls. If I am watching a video or playing any multiplayer game it causes a disconnection due to switching of network as 4G in my area is poor.
This is iPhone 14 and up question (iPhones supporting Vo5G toggle). Not meant for Android users.

 

[Rickysin]

Seems like airtel is doing some upgrade for 5g is Hyderabad. I am getting low latency on 5g like 10 ms and sometimes 15 ms most of the time. It hovers between 10-20 ms.

Speeds hover between 120 mbps to 400 mbps most of the time.

Loving this low latency

 

[SayantaN]

Airtel 5G SA started here

 

[santorini]

Which city?

 

[SayantaN]

Rest of Bengal circle.

 

[sparkradar]

I don’t know how to feel about Airtel adopting 5G with SA (Standalone) technology. They probably have to do it if they want to deliver true gigabit speeds for FWA and genuinely unlimited, uncapped data plans for mobile users.

In my opinion, though, they should keep the NSA bands as well and not completely replace them with SA. Why not support both? NSA still runs on the existing 4G infrastructure and is already operating at its maximum potential.

Here’s my own experience as an example: Jio went fully SA, which lets them offer genuine 5G download speeds. But because they’re adding so many new towers for 5G, they seem to have reduced focus or capacity on 4G towers. As a result, while 5G is fast, it doesn’t penetrate walls very well, whereas 4G does. Strangely, their 4G performance has become quite poor since they shifted so much attention to 5G infrastructure.

On the other hand, Airtel’s 5G NSA setup can’t reach the absolute peak 5G speeds, but it still provides decent performance (and somehow penetrates walls better, possibly because it relies on the 4G backbone). At the same time, their 4G has improved dramatically. I’m consistently getting over 200 Mbps download speeds on 4G alone.

So in a way, Airtel’s NSA 5G approach has actually made their 4G network much better. This might just be specific to my area, and I could be wrong, but because of this, I’ve set my phone’s data network to 4G only. It gives me longer battery life, more reliable coverage, and honestly excellent speeds.