Airtel Speaks On its Readiness For 5G Technology In Nigeria

Airtel Africa Plc said it is almost fully ready for the implementation of the 5G network. Chief Executive Officer, Raghunath Mandava, disclosed this during the telecoms company’s recently-held Q1 2020 earnings call. The transcript of the earnings call was seen by Nairametrics.

Mandava responding to a specific question about Airtel’s perspective regarding the 5G network and how far they’ve come towards developing their 5G network.

“5G availability is valued across the world and I have said before this is an area where we are very keen. Some of our networks are actually very well set up for 5G or surely 4.5G,” Mandava stated.Mandava noted that there are still a lot of things that need to be done in mapping out the framework for 5G network in Nigeria. This is because the country is not fully ready to adopt 5G technology, he stated. He then went ahead to fully explain his point of view, saying:

“We are planning ahead but the key question is, what instances do we run 5G on and what are the use cases? We still have not seen enough of these use cases or of conversion. 5G normally requires a huge broadband spectrum. Currently, the way we are operating with this, let’s say we consider two uses. One, is for autonomous cars that everyone talks about. So, for this, the latency is very low. That latency is the amount of time you can take a decision between getting a signal and coming back. That has to be low for autonomous cars and many such devices. Then, you need very high speeds both for broadband and others.”

Meanwhile, despite this, the CEO said that Airtel is still very much keen on 5G network and is working towards implementing it. He, however, did not give any specific date as to when the network would be ready. According to him, “we will be actively looking at 5G but from a distance for the time being now.”