Now Jio has launched 5G-SA and brought 5G-FWA (fixed wireless access) to connect homes with wireless broadband. Initially Airtel with their 5G-NSA could not enter into 5G-FWA market as 5G core is very much essential for roll out 5G-FWA, but they now entered into 5G-FWA market with their limited 5G-SA deployment.
Rajeev Saluja, Vice President, 5G Radio, Reliance Jio notes, “... the first and foremost is our 5G standalone deployment coupled with network slicing. It allows us to do very dense FWA deployments without compromising on mobile broadband experience...We do broadband deployment in a fully automated, technology-agnostic manner... We’re not just giving high-speed broadband—we’re delivering a full content ecosystem, which is a huge differentiator.”
Vi, the third private telco, was late to deploy 5G (mostly 5G-NSA), and they are heavily debt-ridden, hence deploying 5G in such pockets where revenue generation is much easy, i.e. in urban pockets. Vi cleared that they are not entering into 5G-FWA market any time soon. That also echoes the fact Vodafone or Idea never had home broadband service (though Vodafone had acquired YOU Broadband in 2016, and now it's a subsidiary of Vi).
Fourth telco of the country, BSNL is deploying 4G-LTE over 700 & 2100 MHz and expecting to launch 5G in Delhi and Mumbai in December 2025 - we are not expecting 5G-FWA from BSNL anytime soon but soft launch was done in Hyderabad in June '25 as Quantam 5G FWA - eSIM based 5G-FWA services.
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| Jio AirFiber Subscribers (incl 5G + UBR) |
Jio also achieved another milestone in its 5G journey. On early September 2025, Aayush Bhatnagar, senior vice president, Jio announced that Jio has successfully enabled Voice over New Radio (VoNR) across India, leveraging its fully indigenous 5G Standalone (SA) Core and Jio’s own IMS (IP multimedia subsystem)-enhanced VoNR Core. With Jio's 5G-NR ultra-low latency, high-definition voice services is natively enabled on its 5G-SA network.
5G SA networks can be deployed in a variety of scenarios: as an overlay for a
public 5G non-SA network, as a greenfield 5G deployment for a public network operator without a separate LTE network, or as a private network deployment for an enterprise, utility, education, government or other organisation requiring a private campus network.
As per GSA data of August 2025, globally 5G-SA is being traction moderately - 173 operators in 70 countries and territories worldwide that have invested in public 5G SA networks through trials, planned or actual deployments. This
equates to 27.1% of the operators known to be investing in any 5G licences, trials or deployments.
Back in July 2025, Jio dropped another bomb to broadband communities that some of their FWA services are not over 5G, but on UBR (unlicensed band radio) over 5GHz band. Yes, you got it right, our WiFi runs over 5GHz band too along with 2.4 GHz, and the newer 6 GHz (Wi-Fi 6E and later).
Jio is positioning UBR better than 5G-FWA, as:
- 5GHz has more spectrum (Jio obtained 100MHz 5G spectrum on auction while UBR has capacity of 605MHz)
- As its UBR - unlicensed band, there is no cost to obtain the spectrum - less SUC (start up cost).
- UBR can offer configurable symmetry like 1:1 (same downlink and uplink) while 5G has fixed DL:UL. Dedicated allocation of speed to users can be possible.
- fiber like speed (1Gbps guaranteed, on field trial upto 2.5Gbps).
- Jio developed the required hardware and software for UBR - that also reduce price barrier. Jio's own subsidiary Radisys completed acquisition of Mimosa Networks from Florida based AirSpan in August 2023, and today Mimosa made UBR based FWA devices are the core of Jio AirFiber to reduce the cost of hardware.
Overall there are several limitation of UBR:
1. Lesser range (vs 3500MHz 5G) and line of sight limitation (30dBm EIRP ~ 500m max LOS)
2. Channel size limit - maximum 160MHz
3. Dynamic frequency selection - that may lower downlink speed. And if Radar detected it may needed to be vacated.
4. Carrier aggregation - it would add cost and complexity.
Jio's UBR deployment would also have interference risk - wide beam for multicast actually increases interference and as on unlicensed band they can't control inference. WiFi is being used over 5GHz band, it is not easy to find clean 160MHz channels, that also says that QoS and congestion issues will rise as deployment density grows. Experts believe Jio bets on UBR for rapid roll out and it's a short-term policy. Well Jio has the back up working as Jio Fiber is already launched long before AirFiber was launched.
Now let's get into Mimosa A6 (https://mimosa.co/products/a6) which offers PtMP deployments (point-to-multipoint networks - a single access point to serve multiple subscriber locations), high performance (upto 7Gbps on WiFi 6GHz band, using 8x8 MU-MIMO and 1024-QAM), noise mitigation (Advanced noise-fighting techniques and beamforming make it more resilient in noisy, unlicensed spectrum environments), synchronized network scalability which is a critical factor for FWA.
Probably A6 is the latest model, as C6 (https://mimosa.co/products/c6) and C6x (https://mimosa.co/products/c6x) were initially installed.
From different Jio users I heard about Jio's UBR receivers - earlier it was 32 dbi ones, and now it's smaller (16dbi).
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| UBR Receivers of Jio AirFiber Gen 1 (larger) vs Gen 2 (smaller) |
Frankly speaking UBR is Jio's strategy to connect more customers with broadband with more emphasis over areas where 5G signals are weak, and fiber not feasible.
GSA has identified announced service offers for FWA using LTE/5G from 567 operators in 188 countries and territories and launched services from 495 operators in 176 countries and territories worldwide (Data from June 2025 report).
If you consider global FWA rollouts, note T-Mobile in US is quite successful - second largest subscriber base globally after Jio. Back in 2021, TM-US CEO Mike Sievert had predicted millions of fixed wireless access customers in 2025. Now in 2025 TMUS has 7.3 million customers (vs Verizon Home Internet's 5.1million & AT&T Internet Air's 0.47 million ) and targets 12million by 2028.
All plans of TMUS FWA offer unlimited data (FUP 1.2TB/mo) starting from $35 (Rs 3085 approx) - TMobile says downlink will be 133-415Mbps and uplink 12-55Mbps on 5G-FWA with typical latency of 16-28 seconds. Compared to this, Jio AirFiber Max offers 100Mbps/300Mbps/1Gbps speed - I guess that is being offered over UBR tech.
T-Mobile 5G FWA hardware is delivered by Inseego, the original MiFi innovator. Inseego has FX4100, co-developed with T-Mobile with support for 5G SA, 5G Advanced, features like uplink carrier aggregation and full compatibility with network slicing, enabling future application-specific slices across verticals. With such features T-Mobile is targeting small and medium businesses to feed them data via 5G-FWA technology.
Globally 5G-FWA is also getting traction, as a complement to fiber broadband and a new stream of revenue generation - MTN Group has launched FWA in 6 African countries using Huawei's RuralStar solution. In Saudi Arabia STC is expanding 5G-FWA coverage with additional C-band spectrum (3.7-4.2GHz range). In Oman Oredoo and Omantel launched 5G-FWA to complement their fiber operations.
Europe leads the way with 72 commercially launched 5G FWA networks. In Italy, EOLO deployed Europe's first standalone mmWave 5G-FWA using Nokia's solution. In Finland, Elisa launched Omakaista (Own Lane) 5G-FWA services using Ericsson's tech - it is branded as premium service as network slicing allows allocated specific radio resources and prioritized in scheduling to guarantee its performance.
5G-FWA is here to stay; with implementing 5G-Advanced and carrier aggregation it will be faster in coming days. Even urban users who prefer wireless may opt for 5G-FWA as an alternate to fiber. But using UBR technology as FWA by Jio is definitely a smart move.
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