Airtel Partners with Cisco to Launch India's largest 5G Services

Airtel has now revealed that it has signed a deal with Cisco to launch India's largest 5G ready, integrated optical network and with 100 Gigabit ethernet IP. The network intends to enhance its overall capacity, availability and scale.

The deployment is an Airtel's new initiative to build a 5G services to serve the growing demand for high-speed internet services.

Executive Opinion

CTO, Bharti Airtel, Randeep Sekhon, said, "Airtel continues to transform its network to ensure greater availability and reach across India to deliver best-in-class mobile experience for our customers. Our ongoing collaboration with Cisco is critical in helping us to be 5G-ready, collapsing multiple legacy domains to build a flatter, simpler and automated network with more bandwidth to support internet services and the endless growth in consumer and business applications people rely on every day."

Managing Director, Cisco Service Provider Business, India and SAARC, Anand Bhaskar, said, "Airtel is transforming its network to be modern, adaptable and scalable to accommodate the phenomenal mobile growth in India. Together we are delivering a highly-scalable IP and optical network throughout India that enables broader mobile access to connect more people, and more businesses who can do more with the internet."

Airtel's 5G Services

According to the announcement, Airtel already serves around 300 million subscribers across the 2G and 4G networks.

According to the notes, the new IP over ethernet over the fibre network is one of the largest hypercomplex network transformations in India. It will transform the legacy domains to build an automated 5G-ready IP network with enhanced customer experience.

To expand its services in the rural areas, Airtel has also partnered with the Cisco IP and optical solutions along with the segment routing. Thus making its 5G network cost-effective and with improved network connectivity.

Just a few days back, Bharti Airtel signed a deal with the TCS's cloud-ready HOBS platform to help roll out Products faster.