India’s Next 5G Spending Wave Is Intelligence and Core, and Ericsson Says the Spike Is Over

Ericsson’s regional chief has put the next phase of Indian mobile spending into words operators can be held to. Andres Vicente, CEO for Southeast Asia, Oceania and India, told an analyst briefing in New Delhi on 8 October that the country’s mid-band 5G coverage now reaches 95 percent of the population, against roughly 45 percent globally, and that the 2023-style capital spike is behind the market. What follows, in his account, is incremental spending on core network capability, on BSS and OSS systems that orchestrate it, and on compute placed inside the network for AI workloads.

The coverage number is the reason. When 95 percent of a population of more than 1.4 billion already sits inside mid-band range, what is left to buy is capacity, energy and software instead of new footprint.

India’s regulator publishes the arithmetic monthly. TRAI reported 1,287.92 million wireless mobile subscribers at the end of July 2026, of which 1,204.01 million were active on peak-day visitor location registers, with mobile tele-density at 90.04 percent. A market at that saturation level cannot buy subscribers by adding coverage alone, and it is against that ceiling that Vicente expects the next cycle to be smaller and more software-heavy.

Vicente’s monetisation argument has a number attached as well. He counts more than 30 million fixed wireless access customers in India, using mobile infrastructure to carry traffic to homes and small businesses, and frames that as the first stage of 5G monetisation because FWA lifts average revenue per user above what a handset plan generates. TRAI’s own series shows a base moving more slowly: wireless 5G FWA subscribers rose from 12.94 million at the end of June 2026 to 13.21 million at the end of July, with rural connections slightly ahead of urban at 6.64 million against 6.56 million. The gap between the vendor’s 30 million and the regulator’s 13.21 million is definitional, and it shows how loosely the FWA label travels when a supplier and a regulator count the same households.

Ericsson’s India position is not only sales. The company manufactures antennas at its own plant for the domestic market, and it runs roughly 2,000 R&D engineers in Kraków and Łódź alongside European production in Tczew. The briefing came during India Mobile Congress, which ran from 7 to 10 October at Yashobhoomi in New Delhi, with Ericsson listed as a principal partner.