Bharti Airtel announced its partnership with SK Telecom, a mobile operator in Korea, to utilize SK Telecom’s expertise for network innovation and best customer experience.
The partnership indicates that Airtel has a strategy in place to take lead in emerging areas such as 5G, NFV, SDN and IoT. Airtel also aims to focus more on innovation to enhance customer experience.
The development of bespoke software to improve mobile network experience, leveraging digital tools including machine learning, big data and building customized tools to improve network planning are some of the focus are of the partnership.
Airtel will have the capacity to identify, monitor and deliver improvements to the network experience on an individual device basis – a first in India.
Airtel’s benefits
# Customized software stack on the Network layer to improve customer experience
# Use machine learning and big data to measure network quality and experience at customer device level
# Jointly work towards evolution of 5G, NFV, SDN and IoT
# Build innovative products and solutions for customers
Airtel and SK Telecom will collaborate on standards for 5G, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Internet of Things (IoT), and jointly work towards building an enabling ecosystem for the introduction of these technologies in India.
Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman – Bharti Airtel said: “This partnership will bring a dramatically improved experience to Airtel customers in India by leveraging the expertise of a company that has built one of the best mobile broadband networks in the world.”
SK Telecom and innovation
SK Telecom tested infrastructure trial of a 5G network in association with Nokia and Samsung.
SK Telecom expanded the coverage of its LTE-A Pro services – providing up to 700Mbps to 900Mbps speeds – to 75 cities and 31 counties in Korea.
SK Telecom has expanded the coverage of its 800Mbps-900Mbps LTE-A Pro services by combining three/four-band CA and 4X4 Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) technologies.
SK Telecom has reduced latency between the handset and base station to 2 milliseconds(ms) over its LTE network – in partnership with Nokia.
SK Telecom and Nokia have reduced the latency between LTE handset and base station from 25ms to 2ms by applying Uplink Pre-Scheduling, a technology that enables the handset to immediately transmit data to the base station, and short Transmission Time Interval (TTI), a technology that reduces data transmission time between base station and handset to about 1/7.
SK Telecom has developed a 5G repeater and applied it to its 5G trial network deployed near Gangnam Station in Seoul, Korea.
SK Telecom has 29.83 million mobile subscribers including 21.65 million LTE subscribers. It has reached KRW 17.092 trillion in revenue in 2016.
Park Jung-ho, president and CEO of SK Telecom, said: “SK Telecom will work closely with Bharti to achieve new network innovations so as to deliver a greater value to Airtel customers.”
