Airtel partners with Meta to develop high-speed internet infrastructure in India
Bharti Airtel has partnered with Facebook parent Meta to develop undersea cable infrastructure which will support high-speed internet in the country.
“The two companies, along with Saudi Telecommunication Company, will bring the world’s longest subsea cable system 2Africa Pearls to India, at Airtel’s landing station in Mumbai,” the company said in a statement.
The plan to extend 2Africa Pearls to India was announced by Meta in September 2021.
In addition, Airtel will also integrate Meta’s WhatsApp within its CPaaS platform. With this integration, businesses will now be able to use WhatsApp and reach to provide omnichannel customer engagement to enterprises.
“We, at Airtel, are delighted to deepen our partnership with Meta to serve India’s digitally connected economy by leveraging the technology and infrastructure strengths of both companies. With our contributions to the 2Africa cable and Open RAN, we are investing in crucial and progressive connectivity infrastructure which is needed to support the increasing demand for high-speed data in India. We look forward to working closely with Meta to deliver best-in-class digital experiences to our customers in India,” Bharti Airtel, CEO for Global Business, Vani Venkatesh said.
Airtel and Meta are members of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Open RAN project group. Airtel has signed an agreement to help increase the operational efficiency of Open RAN (radio access network) and facilitate energy management and automation in radio networks using advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning models.
“Airtel is currently conducting trials for 4G and 5G Open RAN solutions on select sites in the state of Haryana and will commercially deploy the solution across several locations in India over the next few quarters,” the company said.
“We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Airtel to further advance the region’s connectivity infrastructure that will enable a better network experience for people and businesses across India,” Meta, vice president of mobile partnerships, Francisco Varela said.
