India’s Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) market is gathering steam, dominated so far by top telco Reliance Jio with 4.8 million out of 5.7 million users, as of January 2025. That is 85% of the total, as reported by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which separated FWA out from wireline broadband for the first time.
That separation highlighted the growing importance of FWA for telcos as a distinct revenue stream, and the only proven one derived directly from 5G. Yet Jio reckons there is scope for faster acceleration given cheaper CPE, especially in a country such as India particularly sensitive to price, in a country notable for its historically low ARPUs.
Jio has also joined some other telcos around the world in calling for a general reduction in the cost of 5G RedCap equipment. That would stimulate a number of IoT sectors, but also FWA, because the cost of CPE installed on rooftops or elsewhere around a premise has become a significant constraint on FWA growth, especially in developing countries.
Reliance Jio joined rival Bharti Airtel, at the recent ETTelecom 5G Congress 2025, in arguing that the price of 5G RedCap was restricting uptake, but both telcos expressed optimism that this would only be a temporary issue. They reckoned that demand in the world’s two biggest 5G markets of India and China would work to reduce prices in a virtuous circle. Demand would come from various industrial and other IoT sectors, but also FWA.
There is an irony here in that 5G RedCap was conceived to reduce cost of IoT devices as a stripped-down version of 5G NR (New Radio) targeting mid-range IoT use cases too demanding for LPWAN protocols served under the massive machine type communication (mMTC) banner, yet not requiring the full performance of the eMBB or URLLC. Yet now it is being criticized for being too expensive.
5G RedCap was also developed as an upgrade path for existing deployments of the LTE Cat 1 to 4 protocols serving IoT applications requiring more than basic LPWAN. With 5G RedCap modules selling at around $50 currently, up to three times the top end LTE Cat-4 modules, there is no incentive for service providers to upgrade, at least until the LTE sunset looms. But that will not happen for at least five years into the next decade, in almost all cases.
Jio and Airtel appear to be looking at halving 5G RedCap prices to make it viable for new IoT use cases. It will have to come down even more than that to achieve the LTE price parity needed to stimulate upgrades from existing services.
There is another wrinkle though with the emergence of the second version called enhanced RedCap (eRedCap) with 3GPP Release 18 in mid-2024, while the original full RedCap, otherwise known as NR Lite, was introduced under Release 17 two years earlier.
Full 5G RedCap devices are available now, with eRedCap devices likely to come on stream in 2026. By reducing complexity further, eRedCap should usher in a new generation of devices at a lower price point anyway, which after all was what motivated its development.
RAN Research, the forecasting arm of Wireless Watch, has argued that eRedCap will grow faster than its parent because it will deliver the required price savings. But it will be confined to lower-performance applications, such as remote sensor monitoring, security, telehealth, and point-of-sale.
Full RedCap will then address those industrial IoT applications that require ultra-low latency and significant bandwidth, but not as much as is needed for say remote high-resolution vision processing.
FWA will also need full RedCap to support bitrates up to 100 Mbps or more, with eRedCap constrained within about 10 Mbps, billed as a successor to LTE Cat 1. That, however, will be where the highest volumes will occur, such that revenues from eRedCap devices will exceed those of full RedCap by the end of the decade.
By that time, India should have an order of magnitude more FWA subscribers than today – around 50 million. Even that is way below Jio’s stated target of 100 million FWA subscribers, in an unspecified timeline but presumably within this decade. The operator has also stated it was aiming at 1 million a month growth, which would actually push the date for reaching 100 million just into the next decade. It is currently running at around that number per month.
As a yardstick, TRAI has stated there are 35 million wireline subscribers, but that has been dropping from a level well above 40 million, largely as users switch to FWA. India’s wireline broadband quality has been generally poor except where direct fiber connections are available, as with Reliance’s Jio Fiber.
It is reasonable to assume that most of those remaining wireline subscribers outside the cities and areas where direct fiber is available will convert to FWA, giving us an initial sizing of the potential. Additional subscriber growth on top of that will depend on FWA CPE prices coming down substantially, with 5G RedCap playing a key role.