Operator profiles updated for 2025: part two

One of them, China Mobile, is the largest mobile operator in the world with more than a billion subscribers. It passed that particular milestone in June 2024.

Many other operators keep a close eye on what China Mobile is doing as its sheer size makes it extremely influential in the mobile sector. In 2024, the company launched the world’s first commercial 5G-Advanced network, initially covering 100 cities. By the end of 2024, the operator had expanded this to more than 300, with plans to further enhance coverage in 2025.

In India, Reliance Jio said it had a total of 482 million subscribers at the end of December 2024, representing a growth rate of 2.4 per cent from the same period in 2023. Of this total, the company has “over 170 million” subscribers to its 5G network, making it “the world’s leading standalone 5G operator outside China”, it says.

That’s quite the achievement for a company whose service is less than ten years old. Reliance Jio launched commercial 4G in September 2016. Our profile of India’s Bharti Airtel, which runs mobile networks in 14 African countries, has also been updated.

Another big fish in the Asian telecoms sector is Japan’s largest operator NTT Docomo. The company is expanding its “sub6” coverage (the expression used in Japan for the mid-band, covering 3.7 GHz and 4.5 GHz) across Japan, focusing mainly on urban centres. The company also wants to use new 5G overlays that use 4G bands to construct what Docomo calls “an even thicker network”. The traditional 4G bands are those below the mid-band.

In the Middle East, Qatar’s Ooredoo is still waiting to see if the country’s regulator will identify the upper 6 GHz band for IMTInternational Mobile Telecommunications (I…, while Malaysia’s Axiata is merging its Indonesian unit with Smartfren. This is just the latest in a series of mergers that have helped the company to grow its international subscriber base and spectrum portfolio.

Updated profiles of the following companies are now available to Spectrum Research Service subscribers:

• Ooredoo
• Axiata
• China Mobile
• NTT Docomo
• Reliance Jio
• Bharti Airtel