Redmi recently launched its cheapest 5G smartphone in India, dubbed Redmi A4 5G. The brand claims that this smartphone was launched to provide 5G network access to people who cannot afford to pay for high-end 5G devices. But there’s a catch. It is not widely compatible with 5G and not all the telecom operators in India will be able to give the support of 5G network to the device due to its hardware limitation. Read the full story below.
Redmi A4 5G will only work with Jio in India
In the Indian Mobile Congress 2024 event, Xiaomi launched its budget 5G device called the Redmi A4 5G. Not only the device is Xiaomi’s cheapest 5G offering in the country, but it is also the cheapest 5G device available. However, Redmi’s official product specifications page reveals that the device doesn’t support both NSA (non-stand-alone) and SA (standalone) 5G bands. Instead, there’s the support for only 5G SA (stand-alone) network bands.
Technically speaking, the SA (standalone) 5G network tech is better than NSA (non-stand-alone), because it runs on independent radio technologies for the delivery of the network. The NSA, on the other hand, uses the existing radio frequencies and the network infrastructure of the 4G network to deploy and provide 5G network services. This makes the NSA tech more cheaper and easier to adopt than the SA 5G. The NSA is also capable of offering an almost similar 5G experience since both of them can deliver up to 1GBPS of network speeds.
Talking in terms of Indian telecom infrastrutre, only Jio and Airtel offer the 5G support in the country. These are also two major telecom players in the country and they combined account for as much as 70% of the market share.
The Airtel 5G network works on NSA 5G tech, whereas the Jio uses the advanced standalone (SA) 5G network infrastructure. And since Redmi A4 5G only supports SA 5G, it effectively eliminates the Airtel in terms of 5G capability in the device. So in short, only the Jio users can enjoy true 5G in the Redmi A4 5G device. Airtel and other telecom network providers will be forced to use a 4G network.
