Airtel to trim 4G capex with up to 30% jump in 5G traffic

Bharti Airtel on Wednesday said that the company will squeeze its investments on 4G capacity and direct it towards 5G. This comes after the company started to see increased traffic on 5G at particular sites, moving away from 4G.

“If you look at an individual customer, on a particular site that has 5G, about 25-35% of traffic is already getting offloaded on 5G from 4G. So, 5G could be a capacity offload of 4G and therefore, one of the things that we are looking at is to squeeze out our 4G capacity investments,” said Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO (India and South Asia), in the post-earnings call with analysts.