5G has been around in India for a few months and the major telecom operators are racing to deploy their 5G networks nationwide. Reliance Jio and Airtel are currently leading this race when it comes to offering 5G connectivity in the country. However, 5G reception has been mixed in these early stages. Part of this is due to the nature of the support provided by the manufacturers. While companies like Samsung and Oppo were first to roll out Android updates to enable 5G compatibility on their smartphones, it took Apple nearly two months to announce official 5G support in India with the release of iOS 16.2 earlier this week.
On this week’s episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 Podcast, host Achil Arora talks to Senior Reviewer Ali PardiwalaManufacturer Aditya Nath Jhaand senior sub-editor Siddhant Chandra – that’s me – to discuss the 5G experience in India in these early stages of deployment.
The discussion begins with the 5G deployment process, with Chandra and Pardiwala pointing out that you’ll receive an invitation to the Jio True 5G Welcome offer to get 5G on your phone. Even if your device manufacturer gave you an update in time, if you don’t have an invite, you’re out of luck. As was the case with Pardiwala.
Jha went through something similar – while consuming Airtel 5G for almost a month on his iPhone He recently joined Jio True 5G via the iOS developer beta, with several failed attempts to “accept” the welcome offer.
Interestingly, there is a difference in the approaches to yo and Airtel on the 5G rollout in India. While Reliance deploys “standalone” 5G, the latter builds on top of its 4G LTE network. Because of this, Airtel has been able to roll out 5G across India while Jio is slowly expanding its 5G coverage city by city.
Of course, one of the biggest questions right now is: How is the performance of Jio and Airtel 5G? Chandra and Jha talk about their experiences, uptime and connectivity, upload and download speeds, latency and packet loss.
And we’ll end by trying to answer another important question: Should you switch from a 4G to a 5G phone? To discover that and more, tune in to the latest Orbital episode by clicking the play button on the Spotify player embedded above.
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