India heading for FWA top spot by 2027

• India’s telcos are making the most of their shiny new 5G networks
• Both Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, the country’s two current 5G powerhouses, have harnessed their networks for fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband services
• Research firm expects India to be the largest 5G FWA market in the world by 2027, ahead of the US

India is on course to become the world’s leading 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) market by 2027 with over 30 million subscribers, at which point it will likely have overtaken the US, the current global leader with its 15 million FWA subscribers, projected to be 25 million by 2027, calculates Counterpoint Research. 

Those numbers, and India’s lead in FWA market size, creates a real inflection point for India, according to Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, as it means the country can build and maintain a really effective FWA ecosystem to keep ahead in the technology.

As a leading “mobile first” country it already has major advantages for FWA, not least a significant and still rapidly growing 5G infrastructure, having deployed more than 400,000 5G base stations by end 2023.

Both major Indian operators, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, launched 5G FWA services in late 2023 (JioAirFiber and Airtel Xstream AirFiber respectively), with the number of 5G FWA users in the country set to reach 5 million by the end of this year and 10 million by the end of 2025. The demand for the services and rapid expansion of the market is thought to be brewing a range of FWA ecosystem benefits, including lower chipset prices, better economies of scale, and a rapidly expanding range of compatible devices and infrastructure.

But one of the biggest spurs for FWA adoption is the relative dearth of fixed wired broadband access infrastructure in India that might otherwise have provided a range of alternatives for both residential and corporate broadband users. That, along with the technology’s perceived cost-effectiveness for operators, means that FWA was, and is, judged to be more economical to deploy and maintain compared to fibre-to-the home (FTTH) networks.

As a result FWA, powered by 5G, has hit the ground running in India and even exhibits an inversion of the situation in North America and Europe, where it’s often seen as ‘infill’ for areas yet to benefit from fibre access or in areas too remote or thinly populated for fibre to be viable.

At present that doesn’t look to be its likely role in India. Specific percentages of FWA versus other access technologies are difficult to come by, but observers believe that 5G FWA is growing rapidly with operator Jio claiming that it had connected 2.8 million homes with FWA by September this year.

Plus, technology and network improvements on the way for 5G indicate that FWA has a robust medium-term future.

For instance, the introduction of 5G standalone and 5G-Advanced will pep up network performance and efficiency, while the integration of millimeter-wave will provide high speed capacity in dense urban areas, with the extra advantage of freeing up mid-band spectrum for general deployment.

Given these advances, 5G FWA should even be able to cope with user demands over 100 Mbit/s and thus be able to support even the most demanding applications by 2030, making it highly competitive with traditional fixed broadband solutions.

It may not yet be ‘dominant’ in terms of Indian broadband access, but it does appear to be the fastest growing sub-segment right at this moment and thus likely to make a significant contribution to closing India’s digital divide given its likely penetration in rural and suburban areas.