Bharti Airtel today announced their partnership with Cisco to initiate India’s most significant 5G Ready, 100G IP and optical integrated network. As per the effect of the partnership with Cisco, Bharti Airtel’s plan to build a 5G ready network will accelerate as the merger will enhance network availability, capacity and scale which would cater the growing demand of high-speed data services in India. On the partnership with Cisco, Randeep Sekhon, CTO of Bharti Airtel noted that their ongoing collaboration with Cisco would be essential as it will help the telco giant to be 5G Ready and create a flatter and simpler network which would provide high-speed internet services to endless customers and business applications.
Benefits of Airtel-Cisco Partnership
The demand for high-speed internet services is rapidly growing in India. Bharti Airtel currently serves over 280 million mobile subscribers across 4G and 2G technologies in India. The new IP developed by the telco giant over Ethernet is the most substantial hyper-complex brownfield network transformation in India, which will collapse multiple legacy domains in order to build a smaller and flatter 5G ready IP network. As part of this partnership, Cisco’s IP will extend the services in rural areas which would enhance the network coverage and result in the optimum cost structure.
India Has the Second Largest Telecommunications Market in the World
The Indian telecommunications market is growing at a rapid scale. Currently, India has 1.17 billion active subscribers. Also, as per the annual internet reports of Cisco, it is expected that India will add 67.2 million 5G connection by the end of 2023 and approximately 66 % of the active connections will be mobile-connected. Bharti Airtel continued their expansion plan and has developed a simple, flexible, agile and software-defined platform which would cater the exponential mobile internet growth in India.
The speed which has been already realised will help the telecommunication industry in new B2B and B2C services. On the merger, Anand Bhaskar who is the Managing Director of Cisco Service Provider Business India and SAARC marked that Bharti Airtel is transforming their network in India to cater the growing demand of mobile growth and internet services. Also, the merger between Cisco and Bharti Airtel will result in a highly scalable IP and optical network, which will increase the mobile access and business opportunities in India.
