India counted roughly 550 million 5G subscribers by September 2026, yet 5G still reaches only about one-third of the population — a gap Ericsson treats as its next growth story in the market, not a warning sign.

Nitin Bansal, Ericsson's Managing Director for India and Head of Networks for South East Asia, Oceania and India, told Telecom Gazette's sister coverage at the India Mobile Congress (IMC) that reports of a demand plateau miss what AI applications are about to do to Indian networks.

"We do not believe that growth has plateaued. Growth will continue as AI applications introduce new network requirements, including higher uplink speeds and lower latency for applications such as augmented and virtual reality and the management of critical infrastructure," Bansal said. "Network expectations will continue to rise, and data consumption will grow further."

How big is the Indian opportunity in numbers?

The figures behind his optimism are concrete. Average monthly data usage now runs at 36–37 GB per user, according to Ericsson's June 2026 Mobility Report — a level, Bansal noted, the company "would not have anticipated a few years ago." Government figures presented at IMC show 5G services available in 99.9% of India's districts, four years after the country launched 5G in October 2022. India is targeting one billion 5G subscribers by 2030.

The commercial counterweight: Ericsson's South East Asia, Oceania and India market contributed 12% of company business in 2025, down from 20% in 2023. Bansal's growth argument arrives after two years of shrinking share for the region, and he competes in India against Nokia and Samsung.

What is actually monetizing?

For operators, coverage has so far translated into adoption faster than into revenue. Deployment began with enhanced mobile broadband, then Fixed Wireless Access. TRAI data show 13.45 million 5G FWA subscribers at the end of August 2026 — a measure of where wireless broadband is genuinely substituting for fixed lines.

Bharti Airtel, India's second-largest operator, recently moved up the value chain with a 5G network-slicing service that gives postpaid customers faster, more reliable connections. It is one of the first concrete examples of differentiated 5G charging in the market.

Bansal's own prediction on new revenue is cautious in scope. "I believe that we are moving in the right direction, and we should see some more monetization use cases coming our way in the coming months," he said. That is a promise of cases, not of numbers — no revenue targets, subscriber projections or contract values accompanied it.

Was pan-India 5G too fast?

Critics have questioned whether Indian operators should have deployed 5G nationwide in one of the world's fastest rollouts rather than staggering it by use case. Bansal rejected the premise.

"5G is not about use case for Indian networks. India needed capacity and 5G brings the capacity in the most efficient way. So, rather than expanding on 4G, I believe India did the right thing by evolving to 5G," he said. "The true value of 5G comes with ubiquitous coverage. And so, with the nice coverage that we have and we also have a lot of 5G Standalone (5G-SA) deployment as well, it opens up other monetization possibilities."

His argument rests on capacity economics: 5G carries India's traffic load more efficiently than more 4G would have. The monetization possibilities he cites depend on the 5G-SA core, where operators can run network slicing — a dependency he acknowledged but did not quantify.

On AI, Bansal added a caveat of his own: existing Indian networks can support AI applications, but operators will have to optimize them for particular applications' requirements. Growth, in other words, is conditional on further spending. Whether the coming months deliver the monetization use cases he expects will be the test of the vendor's read on a market that already covers virtually every district in the country.