Why India is a remarkable 5G success story

• For a long time, India struggled to keep pace with mobile technology advances
• Now it is among the leading 5G nations
• Little more than two years after the first services were launched, the country now has almost 300 million 5G users and nationwide coverage
• Vodafone Idea has now also joined India’s 5G fray

India, for so long dogged by regulatory delays and inadequate infrastructure, is now one of the most surprising and impressive 5G rollout and uptake stories in the world, boasting nationwide coverage and almost 300 million 5G users less than 30 months after the first 5G services were launched. 

In October 2022, following an intense period of spectrum auctions and initial network investments by the country’s two leading operators, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, 5G services were debuted in a few select cities across India. 

Fast forward to the end of February 2025 and India, a country with a population of more than 1.4 billion people and 1.15 billion mobile connections, had 5G services available in 99.6% of the country’s districts, served by 469,000 5G-enabled base stations, according to Dr Pemmasani Chandra Sekhar, Minister of State for Communications and Rural Development, in a written statement shared with the country’s upper house of parliament and published by the government’s press information bureau.  

Sekhar noted that the 5G rollout in India was “one of the fastest” and that the network operators have exceeded their minimum rollout obligations. He also pointed out that “approximately 25 crore [250 million] mobile subscribers have started using 5G services”, but that number undersells just how quick the uptake has been – at least according to the country’s two top telcos.

Market leader Reliance Jio ended 2024 with more than 170 million 5G customers, while Bharti Airtel’s managing director noted on the company’s fiscal third-quarter earnings call in February that its 5G customer base hit 120 million at the end of last year, putting the total for the two operators at 290 million.  

And there’s more to come. While Jio and Airtel continue to grow their 5G customer numbers they are now facing competition from the country’s third-largest operator, Vodafone Idea (Vi), which has just launched its 5G services in Mumbai with tariffs starting at just 299 rupees ($3.49) per month, an offer that Vi claims is “the most competitively priced option in the market”.

Having awarded $3.6bn worth of deals to Ericsson, Samsung and Nokia to improve 4G coverage and roll out its 5G network (the Mumbai network is based on Nokia’s tech), Vi now plans to achieve 90% population coverage with its 4G services and the ongoing launch of 5G “in key geographies”. The operator’s CTO, Jagbir Singh, noted: “Our focus is on introducing 5G meaningfully for our users. We have invested in building a robust 5G network, by deploying the latest 5G technology. By expanding our infrastructure, we are delivering a network that is ready for the future – seamless, powerful and built for the demands of modern connectivity.” 

It wasn’t so long ago that such statements would have been regarded as folly and hot air, but India’s telecom sector is very different now to how it was 10 or 15 years ago, when there was little momentum from lawmakers, regulators or service providers. Jio’s arrival shook up the market and it coincided with a new focus by the country’s government on improving supporting infrastructure and making India a global tech superpower – it’s remarkable that the country now has the resources to support datacentre operations. 

Now when India says it wants to play a major role in the development of 6G, it is taken seriously. The average revenue per user for 5G services might not match that of other markets and there’s no suggestion that India’s 5G services are in any way ‘better’ than those elsewhere, but the very fact that a nationwide rollout was successfully enabled in just a few years and that uptake has been so strong makes India an undoubted, and in some senses unlikely, 5G success story. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV