Why are Indian telecoms ignoring 4G upgrades while going all in on 5G?

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I know Indian ISPs and telecom operators are going full throttle with 5G deployment and equipment upgrades, but that doesn’t mean they should ignore or sideline 4G infrastructure.

4G still covers a much larger area, supports millions of legacy devices, and powers a huge number of IoT devices like connected cars, smart meters, industrial equipment, and more. Many of these will continue to rely on 4G for years to come.

In other countries, carriers actively improve their LTE networks using LTE Advanced features like Cat 18, heavy Carrier Aggregation (CA), and advanced MIMO, easily achieving 300–400 Mbps in real-world conditions and sometimes even 600–800 Mbps.
Yet in India, 4G speeds often feel stagnant and inconsistent, especially during peak hours.

What do you think is the better strategy?
Should telecom companies focus only on investing in 5G because it’s the new technology that can generate more revenue and support advanced features, while keeping 4G mainly for IoT and legacy devices?

Or should they also maximize LTE capabilities so that 4G can deliver much better performance alongside 5G?

I mean I'm fine with 4G if getting around 200mbps of speed, better for me and my phone's battery

If I'm wrong about anything here (like the technical capabilities of LTE Cat 18 or how 4G/5G are being handled), please correct me. Would love to hear your opinions and thoughts on this.
 
Both should be improved in tandem, 4G was supposed to handle max mobile data usage while 5G was thought about to be used in m2m or IoT works alas nothing happened in concrete rather in a race to appease some political show 5G was deployed and bas no use case nothing just the greedy telcos now trying to recover their money. 6G would be put through the same circus mark my words.
 
Jio and Airtel spent billions in 5G rollout ,4G isnt a priority anymore and well all 3 telecos are planning to refarm 4G spectrum for 5G use in future. Another thing is that those countries dont have so much specturm irregularities as compared to India.

India is doing a lot better in 4G than what it was back in 2017/18 ,since during off peak hours especially early morning you can see 4G speeds above 100mbps as well

my guess to why we dont see 400-500mbps on 4G is because telecos probably dont see an incentive for upgrading cell sites with more fiber when the end customer still only pays 250rs a month

5G was a good way to push everyone to spend more money and looking at how many active 5G subscribers Jio and Airtel with consistent improvements in ARPU ,it is better for them to push 5G plans than 4G.
 
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