New Delhi: Vodafone Idea (Vi), boosted by equity funding, is set to start rolling out next generation (5G) commercial services by March 2025 across 17 circles, starting with Delhi and Mumbai, and is aiming to reach at least 90% of India's population with 4G coverage by June next year, said its chief technology officer Jagbir Singh."We are going a little slow (wih 5G), but we will be doing 5G in Delhi and Mumbai first, and of course, all metros and major cities across 17 states (circles)," he told ET.Vi, as part of a revival plan, has raised equity funding of ₹24,000 crore including ₹18,000 crore from a follow-on public offer. The telecom operator has said that the bulk of the funds will be used to beef up 4G coverage and roll out 5G as it strives to become more competitive against rivals Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel and stop the decline in the number of subscribers."Today, nearly 1.03 billion people are covered with around 77% of 4G coverage. As of now, we want to go from this 77% to at least 90%," Singh said, adding that the telecom operator would be able to achieve the target by June next year.He expects the telco to arrest subscriber losses within a quarter of network completion. 114293425Vi is a late 5G entrant due to its financial woes. Rivals Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel had commercially launched 5G services in October 2022.Further, Singh said, the joint venture between the UK’s Vodafone Group Plc and India’s Aditya Birla Group would continue to focus on 17 licensed areas or telecom circles for both 4G and 5G coverage, including roaming customers.The telco's focus, he said, would be the deployment and expansion of 4G to improve the quality of the network and provide more capacity, as well as leverage all the spectrum in order to meet growing capacity.The telco has spectrum in the 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz, 2300 MHz and 2500 MHz bands.“In the 900 MHz band we had only 55,000 sites. Now we are going to 150,000 sites, out of which 50,000 are already done, crossing 100,000 sites. Another 50,000 sites will be done by the next nine months,” Singh said.Radio waves in the 900 MHz band, he said, is the “topmost focus” for the telecom carrier since it offers better coverage in cities, including indoors.He said that there are no hurdles in execution of the project and that all tower companies including Indus Towers, ATC and Tower Vision, have accepted Vi’s requirements till March.“Everybody is working to make the towers available from the first or second week of November, so we can start all out. So, I see no challenge in terms of execution of the project,” he said.He did not comment on clearance of previous dues to tower companies such as Indus Towers.The telco will not renew expiring network contracts with Chinese-origin vendors, he said."When we floated a request for proposals (RFP), it included these Chinese equipment swap plans, if not immediately, but at least keeping in mind some equipment will come to end of life, end of support, so we will replace them. But do we have the plan within, like two years, to replace everything? Answer is no,” Singh said.Banking on virtualised radio access network (vRAN), Vi has been engaged by South Korean firm Samsung in Karnataka, Bihar and Punjab circles.The telco, however, said that its tryst with openRAN has not been encouraging so far.Following its partnership with US-based Mavenir, the telco deployed open network in 25 sites in Jalandhar.“This was given (to Mavenir) around a year back, for 4G and 5G both. So, we had done the deployment, and initially we had a lot of hiccups. There is no doubt about it – the maturity of openRAN is still not there. In fact, TCO (total cost of ownership) is more expensive rather than being cheaper (than classical RAN),” Singh said, adding that Vi does not expect large commercial deployments soon.He also said that private 5G networks for enterprise deployments have not kicked off globally. “And the reason could be that there is no business case. We have done trials for one or two customers. But we don’t actually see a strong use-case for that company or the enterprise that they are able to justify the cost,” he said.On the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in telecom, Vi has had initial conversations with tech service providers including IBM, Accenture, Microsoft and Google to replicate use cases such as network planning, operations, automations and service quality, Singh said.Vi does not see satellite communication as competition to terrestrial networks but rather a “complement by reaching rural and disaster prone areas and expanding connectivity”, he said.In February last year, the Indian government converted debt-ridden Vi’s dues into equity, taking nearly 33.5% stake in the company, becoming the single largest stakeholder.
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