RedHat and IBM completes first phase deployment of Airtel's Open-Hybrid Cloud Network

Bharti Airtel has now announced that it has completed the first phase of the deployment of an open-hybrid cloud network, which it is building in partnership with Red Hat and IBM.

The new network cloud would help Airtel to offer better network performance as well as to reduce the network lag and improve bandwidth. Bharti Airtel’s Open Hybrid Cloud Network will allow the industry to leverage the power of emerging technologies like 5G and edge computing, notes the announcement.

Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel, said, "Airtel has been at the forefront of adopting leading-edge technologies to modernize our network architecture. By adopting an open hybrid cloud network with the support of IBM and Red Hat we are building a scalable and future-ready network to serve our customers with best-in-class services."

Steve Canepa, Global Managing Director, Communications Sector and Worldwide Head of Telecommunications, Media & Entertainment Industry, IBM, said, "Together with Bharti Airtel, our most recent automation benchmarks have demonstrated our approach can shorten RAN service deployment times from weeks to a few days -- compelling improvements in innovation for Bharti and their customers."

Now, with the completion of the first phase, IBM said that Airtel and its ecosystem partners would have a flexible and scalable foundation to build and deploy new applications on the cloud network.

Under this first phase, Airtel and IBM have also co-developed a “single-click” automated hybrid cloud design, along with the operations named ‘light touch’.

These capabilities would help Airtel to improve the network connectivity and accelerate core network transformation and would also result in being able to speed the launch of new cloud services and onboard new customers quickly.

The architecture has been built on Red Hat’s OpenShift and OpenStack and would also help Airtel manage communications across the distributed environment when completed.

The Architecture would also help the Airtel with an open-source Radio Access Network for better interoperability between the ecosystem partners.