Delhi Airport becomes 5G-ready ahead of October 1 rollout

With the rise in passenger footfall, airports have witnessed a rise in demand for more bandwidth and faster speed from passengers.

Airlines and other airport stakeholders also seek fast, seamless, and secure connectivity for their essential technologies to enhance the passenger experience.

Hence, to meet the demand, Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport has become 5G-ready, enabling passengers to use the world's advanced mobile service once inside the terminal as soon as the services are rolled out by the Telecom Service Providers (TSPs).

The 5G, which is the next step in mobile telephony, will help in enhancing existing applications of the airports, like passenger processing, baggage management, and airport operations, among others.

Officials said that flyers having a 5G-enabled mobile phone and sim card can experience a better signal strength, seamless connectivity, negligible latency, and faster data speed at the Domestic Departure pier and International Arrival Baggage area at Terminal 3, and between T3 Arrivals and Multi-Level Car Parking (MLCP).

The deployment across Terminal 3 would be covered in a phased manner.

Currently, a few TSPs have enabled their network to facilitate 5G service for their customers and expect others to connect in the next few weeks.

Apart from these, people visiting GMR Aerocity Delhi can also get a feel of the 5G network at GMR Square.

GMR Square is a unique concept for any Indian airport which offers easy access to the commercial hubs of Aerocity from public places. It offers pedestrian experiential walks at GMR Aerocity Delhi.

Passengers will be able to enjoy a 20 times faster data speed on a 5G network as compared with the available Wi-Fi system or 50 times faster data speed over the existing data communication network.

The 5G network would allow for quicker downloads, zero buffering during streaming, seamless execution of resource-intensive applications like 3D Gaming, Virtual reality experience, extremely high-density connectivity, and extremely deep coverage in all areas.

To provide a world-class mobile experience to its passengers, DIAL, a GMR Airports Infrastructure Limited-led consortium that operates and manages Delhi airport, had set up the In-Building Solutions (IBS) for the 5G network well in advance.

Also, it will enable airports to go for new technologies like edge computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), digital twin creation, and artificial intelligence.

At the airport, this feature of the next-generation mobile technology will help improve connection density and enhance passengers' experience. Passengers can experience unified signal strength, seamless connectivity, negligible latency, and unimaginable data speed."