Indian state-owned telco Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) reportedly soft-launched a 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) offering in Hyderabad and other select cities on Wednesday.
According to The Hindu, the service – which is branded as Q-5G FWA (a.k.a. Quantum 5G FWA, although no quantum communications technologies are involved) – is targeting enterprises, businesses, gated communities and individual households.
BSNL chairman and managing director A. Robert J. Ravi said the Q-5G FWA service is built on BSNL’s direct-to-device platform with a fully indigenous stack core designed and integrated by Indian vendors under the government’s Atmanirbhar Bharat programme to make India more self-reliant, efficient and competitive, the report said.
Ravi also said the pilot will be expanded to Bengaluru, Pondicherry, Visakhapatnam, Pune, Chandigarh and Gwalior by September 2025.
BSNL was allocated 5G spectrum in the 700-MHz, 3300-MHz and 26-GHz bands by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) in April. The telco plans to launch its mobile standalone 5G service in Delhi sometime this year, but the project has run into problems – partly because BSNL is required to use only indigenous gear to build the network, and partly because of disputes with vendors over its revenue sharing model.
It's had somewhat more luck in the private 5G space, having secured a deal in January along with local IT systems integrator Echelon Edge to deploy a private 5G network at Coal India Limited’s coal mine facility in Madhya Pradesh.
