Airtel-Meta to jointly invest in global network connectivity infra

Airtel will partner with Meta and Saudi Telecom Company (STC) to extend 2Africa Pearls to India. 2Africa is the world’s longest subsea cable system and is expected to provide faster internet connectivity to almost 3 billion people globally.

Airtel and Meta will extend the cable to Airtel’s landing station in Mumbai and also pick up dedicated capacity to further strengthen its submarine network portfolio.

Both Airtel and Meta are members of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Open RAN project group. Airtel has signed an agreement to help increase operational efficiency of Open RAN and facilitate energy management and automation in radio networks using advanced analytics and AI/ML models.
The telco 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, it said in a statement.

Airtel will share its learnings with wider ecosystem partners within the TIP community, including Meta, to help accelerate the deployment of Open RAN-based networks across the world.

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Vani Venkatesh, chief executive – global business, Bharti Airtel said, “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.”

Francisco Varela, vice president of mobile partnerships for Meta said, “Subsea cables and open, disaggregated networks continue to play a huge role in the foundational infrastructure needed to support network capacity and fuel innovation. 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.”

Businesses in India are rapidly shifting to cloud-based solutions to serve their customers digitally. Airtel IQ, Airtel’s Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) ecosystem, offers cloud communication across voice, messaging and video channels to help enterprises with their customer engagement and drive profitability by leveraging automation and boosting revenue.

Airtel will integrate Meta’s WhatsApp within its CPaaS platform. With this integration, businesses will now be able to use WhatsApp’s features and reach to provide omnichannel customer engagement to enterprises.