India’s 26 GHz spectrum pits Jio’s Wi-Fi vision against Airtel’s 5G

Reliance Jio is pushing an indigenous Wi-Fi-based broadband technology into millimetre-wave frequencies that were sold to operators as the backbone of 5G. Airtel says it breaks the rules. The regulator must decide, and the answer will shape how India connects hundreds of millions of homes.

India’s telecom sector has weathered two decades of price wars, spectrum squabbles, and regulatory reshuffles. But the latest confrontation between Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel is of a different kind. At its centre is not a tariff or a tower, it is a fundamental question about who gets to define the technology standard for a generation of wireless broadband, and whose ₹15,000 crore spectrum investment will pay off first.

The immediate trigger is Jio’s decision to seek regulatory approval for a broadband service built on IEEE 802.11, the global family of Wi-Fi standards, deployed in the 26 GHz millimetre-wave band. Airtel, which spent heavily on the same frequencies in the 2022 spectrum auctions, has formally objected to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), arguing that the approach falls outside the 3GPP framework that underpins conventional 5G and risks creating interference and interoperability problems across the industry.

Jio has hit back with detailed technical submissions, characterising Airtel’s objections as both technically unfounded and strategically motivated. The battle is now before India’s telecommunications regulator and standard-setting bodies, with a key ruling expected before the end of June.

“This is not a dispute about protocols. It is a dispute about who gets to define what Indian broadband looks like for the next decade.”

The spectrum nobody could quite use
The 26 GHz band has been one of the more conspicuous disappointments in global 5G. Millimetre-wave frequencies offer prodigious bandwidth but punishing propagation characteristics: signals struggle to penetrate walls, travel more than a few hundred metres, or survive a moderately leafy street. The dense small-cell networks required to make mmWave practical at scale have proven prohibitively expensive everywhere from New York to Seoul.

Indian operators who purchased 26 GHz licences in 2022 did so on the promise of enterprise campuses, stadium connectivity, and eventually, last-mile fixed wireless access (FWA) for homes beyond the reach of fibre. Two years on, the returns have been modest. The technology was real; the business case remained aspirational.

Jio’s answer to this impasse is, characteristically, to reframe the question. Rather than waiting for the 3GPP-based 5G FWA ecosystem to mature, the company has been working with Indian research institutions, including IIT Madras and the Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC), on an alternative: a fixed wireless broadband system built on IEEE 802.11ad and 802.11ay, the same Wi-Fi standards already used in the 60 GHz WiGig band, adapted and tested for deployment in India’s 26 GHz allocations. The argument is elegant: Wi-Fi has one of the world’s most mature, lowest-cost device ecosystems; its standards are internationally recognised by the IEEE; and India’s spectrum licensing framework is, on its face, technology-neutral.

If the approach works at scale, Jio could be offering a competitive broadband service in semi-urban and peri-urban markets within twelve to eighteen months, using spectrum it already owns, without the capital expenditure of a fibre rollout. That prospect is not lost on competitors.

Airtel’s case: Standards are not suggestions
Bharti Airtel’s objections are organised around three distinct technical and regulatory concerns, according to people familiar with the company’s submissions to DoT.

The first is interference. The 26 GHz band sits adjacent to satellite downlinks and other 5G services. Airtel contends that high-power Wi-Fi transmitters operating in outdoor fixed configurations, the antenna on a rooftop beaming broadband to a home, could produce interference profiles that are materially different from the dense-indoor Wi-Fi environment the IEEE 802.11 standards were originally optimised for. Standard coordination mechanisms between licensed mobile networks and unlicensed or alternative-standard deployments, Airtel argues, have not been established for the 26 GHz environment.

The second concern is electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure. India’s EMF norms for telecom infrastructure have been calibrated and tested against 3GPP network designs. Airtel’s submission questions whether the radiation patterns, duty cycles, and power levels of an outdoor Wi-Fi FWA installation in the 26 GHz band have been assessed under the same framework, and whether TEC has completed the relevant studies before allowing commercial deployment.

The third, and most fundamental, concern is about precedent. If DoT permits a major licensed operator to deploy a non-3GPP technology in a band that was auctioned for 5G services, Airtel argues, it risks creating a fragmented national standards environment, complicating roaming and interoperability, and potentially disadvantaging operators who invested in conventional 5G infrastructure on the assumption that the competitive field would remain standardised.

Airtel has not publicly framed its objections as a competitive manoeuvre. But the subtext is not difficult to read. The company most dependent on the conventional 3GPP 5G ecosystem, and standing up a competing deployment standard in the same spectrum band it also purchased, is, by definition, a structural threat to Airtel’s 26 GHz investment thesis.

“Airtel invested in 26 GHz on the premise of 5G FWA. Jio is proposing a different game on the same pitch. The regulator now has to decide whether both games can be played at once.”

Jio’s counter: Wi-Fi is not ‘non-standard’
Jio’s response to each of Airtel’s three objections is methodical.

Regarding interference, the company points to TEC’s own technical studies, which it says demonstrate that the proposed FWA deployments, using directional beamforming antennas rather than omnidirectional broadcast antennas, produce significantly smaller interference footprints than a co-located 3GPP small cell at comparable power levels. Beamforming concentrates energy in a narrow arc pointed at the subscriber’s premises, reducing spillover into adjacent spectrum and to neighbouring ground-level receivers.

On EMF, Jio’s position is almost paradoxical in its confidence: the proposed Wi-Fi FWA system operates at substantially lower power levels than existing 4G LTE macro cells, which have been certified compliant with India’s EMF norms for over a decade. If anything, Jio argues, the EMF profile of an 802.11-based outdoor FWA system is less burdensome on the regulatory framework, not more.

On the standards question, the most politically charged of the three, Jio’s submission draws a distinction that its critics have largely elided. The IEEE is not a fringe body. It is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, one of the two dominant global standards organisations in wireless communications alongside 3GPP. Describing IEEE 802.11 as ‘non-standard’ because it is not 3GPP, Jio argues, is precisely equivalent to describing Blu-ray as ‘non-standard’ because it is not HD DVD, both are internationally recognised standards; the question is which one the market chooses to deploy. India’s own DoT framework explicitly permits technologies developed by internationally or nationally recognised standards bodies, subject to prior approval, with no hierarchy between 3GPP and IEEE.

The company has also pointed to the work of the Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI), which has been developing a complementary national standard for 26 GHz FWA deployment that incorporates the IEEE 802.11 technical approach. The involvement of TSDSI, India’s official standards body and a member of the ITU, is Jio’s most potent argument that its approach is within the regulatory perimeter, not outside it.

The regulator’s dilemma
DoT and TEC now face a decision whose implications extend well beyond the 26 GHz band. A ruling in Jio’s favour would establish that India’s technology-neutral spectrum framework means what it says: licensed operators can deploy any internationally recognised standard, including IEEE-based systems, in their allocated frequencies, subject to technical compliance with interference and EMF norms. That outcome would be a significant signal of regulatory maturity, and a competitive green light for Jio’s FWA ambitions.

A ruling in Airtel’s favour, or a prolonged regulatory deferral, would implicitly establish 3GPP primacy in the Indian mmWave band, a precedent that would constrain future technology choices in a country that has invested heavily in developing indigenous telecom standards through TSDSI. It would also strand a portion of Jio’s 26 GHz investment in a 3GPP FWA ecosystem that has not yet delivered a commercially viable product at Indian price points.

TEC’s 26 GHz standard, developed in collaboration with IIT Madras and now approved by relevant industry forums, is expected to be formally published by the end of June 2026. The TSDSI standard is expected to follow shortly. The timing is tight: both documents will define the technical envelope within which DoT will frame its policy response.

The broader context matters. India is in the middle of a push to develop indigenous telecom technology that can be exported, the ‘AtmaNirbhar’ (self-reliant) vision for telecommunications. An indigenous 26 GHz FWA standard, developed through TEC and TSDSI, tested by IIT Madras, and deployed at scale by Jio, would be exactly the kind of outcome that vision is designed to produce. The political economy of the decision tilts, at least at the margins, toward Jio.

“If TEC’s standard clears the table by the end of June, the regulatory clock will have beaten the competitive pressure. That outcome changes the broadband map of India.”

What happens to the homes in between
The stakes of this dispute are easiest to grasp in geography. India’s broadband penetration story is, at its core, a tale of two networks: fibre in the cities, and everything else everywhere else. JioFibre has made substantial progress in Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities. But the economics of laying optical cable to a village in Rajasthan or a housing colony on the urban periphery are prohibitive at any price point that households in those markets can afford.

Fixed wireless access, a rooftop antenna connected by radio link to a nearby tower, delivering broadband without ground-level cable, is the technology category most likely to bridge that gap. The questions have always been cost and speed. Existing 4G FWA is affordable but slow. Conventional 5G FWA is fast but expensive. A Wi-Fi-based system in the 26 GHz band, if Jio’s technical case holds, could thread the needle: gigabit-class speeds at a capital cost closer to Wi-Fi than to 5G.

The numbers Jio has shared with DoT suggest coverage potential in the tens of millions of homes over a five-year rollout, a figure that would make 26 GHz Wi-Fi FWA one of the most significant additions to India’s broadband infrastructure since the company’s own 4G rollout in 2016. Whether those numbers materialise depends on the outcome of a regulatory filing that is currently sitting on a desk in Delhi.

Airtel, for its part, is not without a broadband card to play. The company has been aggressively expanding its own fibre-to-the-home network, and its enterprise and home broadband business has outperformed the market’s expectations over the past two years. A setback for Jio’s FWA ambitions would not leave the home broadband market uncontested, it would simply preserve Airtel’s relative position for longer.

“A Wi-Fi FWA system in the 26 GHz band could thread the needle: gigabit-class speeds at a capital cost closer to Wi-Fi than to 5G.”

The wider signal
Beyond the immediate competitive skirmish, the 26 GHz dispute signals the kind of technology regulator India wants to be. Countries that rigidly enforce single-standard frameworks in licensed spectrum tend to move more slowly but with more predictability. Countries that accommodate multiple technology families in the same band, as the United States has done with the CBRS band and as several European regulators have explored with mmWave, tend to generate more innovation but also more coordination friction.

India’s choice is complicated by its own aspirations. TSDSI’s involvement in the 26 GHz standard development is not incidental, it is part of a deliberate national strategy to build Indian intellectual property into global telecommunications standards, rather than simply licensing 3GPP frameworks developed in Helsinki and San Diego. That strategy requires regulators to be willing to certify Indian-developed standards for deployment in Indian networks, even when those standards challenge incumbent technology paradigms.

The resolution of the Jio-Airtel dispute will say more about the Indian government’s genuine commitment to that strategy than almost any policy statement. And the answer, expected before the monsoon season begins, is one that both companies, and their millions of potential subscribers, are watching closely.
BCS Bureau