Bharti Airtel, a leading telecom company in India, has hosted the O-RAN ALLIANCE Global PlugFest 2021 in India in partnership with major Indian and global technology companies. Airtel hosted the event in its state-of-the-art Network Experience Centre in Manesar (Gurugram), India. It is worth noting that this was the second O-RAN ALLIANCE Global PlugFest that Airtel has hosted in the country. In this year’s event, a wider participation from members of the O-RAN community was witnessed. Companies such as Mavenir, Capgemini Engineering, AMI, ASOCS, IP Infusion, Cisco, Intel, Sercomm, Keysight Technologies, TCS, STL, VMware, VIAVI Solutions, and VVDN had joined Airtel in this year’s event.
PlugFest Learnings to Accelerate Make-in-India O-RAN Based 5G Solutions
Randeep Sekhon, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Bharti Airtel said, the telco is thrilled to be leading the O-RAN initiative in India. The learnings from this PlugFest would accelerate the journey of Make-in-India O-RAN based 5G solutions which can not only be deployed in India but also in the other parts of the world, added Sekhon. Bharti Airtel has been very vocal about supporting the O-RAN initiative and was also the first operator in the country to commercially deploy a virtual RAN solution based on disaggregated and open architecture defined by the O-RAN ALLIANCE. Airtel has also been a board member of the O-RAN ALLIANCE since the beginning, which has now turned into a community of 300+ telecom operators, vendors, and other companies that are into the manufacturing of related technologies. The O-RAN ALLIANCE Global PlugFest offers a platform to other O-RAN community members to integrate and test the O-RAN based solutions, including 4G and 5G. O-RAN promises a cost-efficient deployment of network infrastructure and holds great value for the ecosystem members. But it is still in the developing phase and might only become a wider reality in a few years.
