Airtel and Jio go head to head in battle for 5G

TIL Desk/Business/New Delhi/ The battle for 5G is suddenly hotting up. In an unexpected move last week, Bharti Airtel recently announced that it had become the first telco to demonstrate live non-standalone 5G service over its commercial network in Hyderabad, using existing spectrum in the 1,800 band.

And on the same day communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad extolled the fact that the 5G core (the heart of the network) should be made in India and said his ministry would soon give the much delayed permission for trial runs of the technology.

The Airtel move comes just a few months after Reliance Jio quietly tested its own indigenously designed standalone 5G radio and core far way in the US on a Verizon 5G live network (its application for 3,500 and millimetre band spectrum for testing in India is pending). Reliance, however, declined to talk about it.