Airtel has selected two leading technology vendors — Ciena for coherent optical and Ericsson for AI-powered automation — to enhance customer experience.
Ciena said Airtel is deploying its coherent optical and intelligent software platforms to build a Photonic Control Plane network in India.
Bharti Airtel, which has a strong mobile data presence on 3G and 4G network platforms in India, is creating a new backbone architecture to work with data rates of 400Gbps.
The architecture offers lower latency and software-controlled connectivity for Cloud infrastructure, faster transformation to virtualized platforms, and 5G readiness.
Randeep Sekhon, CTO – Bharti Airtel said: “This will scale our network capacity and protect traffic and enhance service delivery to all our customers.”
Photonics combined with advanced software intelligence enables an agile network that allows for simplified provisioning of end-to-end network wavelengths, speed and capability to handle multiple fiber failures.
The network will also support bandwidth on demand, optical VPNs, latency based routing and dynamic data center interconnects, which will provide a unique value proposition for Airtel’s retail and enterprise customers.
Bharti Airtel will be building intelligent and predictive network operations in association with Ericsson.
Airtel will be leveraging on its developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation to address network complexity and boost user experience.
“AI / ML will be key to Airtel’s customer experience centric operations management,” said Randeep Shekhon.
Ericsson is the managed service partner of Airtel since 2004 and currently manages Airtel’s PAN India 2G, 3G, 4G, Intelligent Network, LAN/WAN and VOLTE technologies.
