Ambani: '1 mn homes every 30 days for 5G FWA' but is 5g FWA even profitable?

[Bhartleby]

Hey folks,

Just curious, In India, you can get airtel/jio air fiber for about 600rs a month with no installation fee or equipment fee. Given there's no obligation to return the equipment (or continue the contract), how do the two big private operators even make money through these plans?

In many countries, if you want the latest iPhone they make you buy an expensive plan (with a long contract) and essentially the plan will pay off the cost of the iPhone over two years. Here, they're giving you an ODU and router for nothing, with no continuing obligation to support the service. I'm trying to figure out how this can be a sustainable practice, if Jio for example, reaches it's 100m homes target and with routers/odus being at least $150 ...

Both companies have sighted FWA (Airfiber) as a major growth area for their 5g businesses, but they have to recoup the cost of installations, in addition to the expensive spectrum they have bought up and tower upgrades.

In general, I just don't see the advantages from an operators perspective beyond more efficient use of spectrum. 5g overall seems like an over-hyped fantasy without any of the promised use cases having materialised...

Am I missing anything here?

 

[sng_shivang]

Like with every new technology, it's not about technology but it's about the efficient use of spectrum. With every generation, there have been significant improvements in the speeds that can be provided over spectrum. For example 5GHz bandwidth on 2G had garbage 20KB/ps throughput but the same bandwidth on 3G, 4G provided much better speeds.
Also while the media (which is largely an idiot) mentions it as "5G spectrum", it's actually not. India now auctions spectrum as technology antagonistic which means carriers are free to use it as they like.

So eventually, we will see older tech getting shut down as more and more people move to newer gen technologies.

 

[Bhartleby]

I get the whole spectrum is agnostic thing. But purely speaking from an operator profitability standpoint, I don't see how they stand to gain by spending incredible sums of money to provision 5g. Especially FWA when you factor the cost of CPEs. They'd have to be betting on a long 5-10 year time frame just to begin to see modest profits..