Bharti Airtel kicked off a 5G trial using 3.5GHz spectrum in the city of Gurugram delivering peak throughput of more than 1Gb/s, with plans to expand the tests to Mumbai in the coming days, The Economic Times (ET) reported.

The operator is using equipment from Ericsson. ET added Bharti Airtel has 5G trial spectrum in Kolkata and Bengaluru in addition to Mumbai and the National Capital Region, which includes Gurugram.

Last month, India’s government cleared operators to conduct six-month 5G trials using equipment from Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia and state-owned technology company C-Dot. Huawei and ZTE were omitted from the list of vendors.

Operators are required to conduct trials in rural and semi-urban areas as well as cities.

The Department of Telecommunication allocated experimental spectrum in the 700MHz, 3.5GHz and 26GHz bands to Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea. The operators also are allowed to use existing spectrum.

ET stated Bharti Airtel was the first in the country to test 5G on a live network, with a trial in Hyderabad using the 1.8GHz band earlier this year.

The operator selected Qualcomm to deploy a virtualised and open RAN-based 5G network in February: it named Cisco as its 5G core network supplier in early 2020.

An auction of 5G spectrum in the 3.5GHz band is expected in H1 2022.

In a spectrum auction in March, 5G-suitable 700MHz spectrum went unsold due to the high reserve price.