Bharti Airtel is working with Ciena to upgrade its networks to prepare for the arrival of 5G in India. The telco has recently deployed Ciena’s 600G and 800G photonic solutions in multiple metro cities of India, including Bangalore, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Delhi. This will help the operator in increasing the overall fiber optic network capacity by up to 3 times. Thus, once 5G networks are commercially live, the increased capacity will help Airtel a ton in providing seamless connectivity services to its customers. ET Telecom’s report suggests that the deployment will also be useful when it comes to supporting high-growth cloud applications and, at the same time, will also be lowering the cost per bit.
Bharti Airtel and Ciena’s Partnership to Build India’s Largest Photonic Control Plane Network
For the unaware, Bharti Airtel and Ciena went into a partnership back in January 2020 for deploying Ciena’s coherent optical and intelligent software platforms to create one of the biggest Photonic Control Plane networks that India has. With the increased optic fiber capacity, Bharti Airtel will be able to handle the spike in the data demand that the Internet-of-Things (IoT), businesses, and consumers will drive with the arrival of 5G in India. Bharti Airtel is already testing its 5G network in Gurgaon’s Cyber Hub, where the telco was able to deliver a throughput of 1 Gbps. Further, last week, Bharti Airtel had announced that it was entering into a strategic partnership with the Tata Group for purchasing and deploying Tata’s homegrown Open-RAN based 5G radio and core solutions. Airtel said that it would be deploying Tata’s indigenous network solutions in January 2022 to support its plans of launching 5G services in the year ahead. Bharti Airtel’s networks around the country are 5G ready. It is worth noting that Airtel became the first telecom operator in the country to demonstrate a live 5G network in the city of Hyderabad using Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) technology and leveraging airwaves in the 1800 MHz band. As per the publication, Airtel has deployed WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics in addition to Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller for improving the efficiency of the networks and supporting high-bandwidth services.
