Airtel’s mid-band 5G trial network live in NCR – Times of India

Telecom company Bharti Airtel has kickstarted its 5G trials on Gurugram, The Times of India-Gadgets Now has learnt.
According to the source, the Sunil Mittal-led telco is running the trial in the 3500MHz band in Gurugram’s Cyber Hub offering a maximum speed of over 1Gbps.
The 5G trials by Airtel are being conducted in partnership with Swedish equipment maker Ericsson.
Airtel has tied up with Apple and BBK-owned smartphone brands — OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Vivo — to test its 5G trial network.
Earlier this year, Airtel became the first telecom company in the country to test 5G over a live commercial network in Hyderabad city, underlining the company’s technology capabilities.
This was followed by a partnership with US-based chip maker Qualcomm where they said that they are collaborating to accelerate 5G in India.
“Through Airtel’s network vendors and device partners, Airtel will utilize the Qualcomm 5G RAN Platforms to roll-out virtualized and Open RAN-based 5G networks. Airtel, as a board member of the O-RAN Alliance, is committed to driving the success of O-RAN and is working with Qualcomm Technologies to explore and implement the O-RAN approach for India,” according to the company.
Back in February, Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal had said that Bharti Airtel’s mobile broadband infrastructure is “totally future-proof ” for quick 5G rollouts.
“In the short-term, 5G rollouts will naturally happen in the urban areas as (high) device prices would be a constraint since massification takes time, but eventually we will have to offer 5G nationally everywhere, especially since mobile broadband is now an essential service,” Vittal said.