Month after tie-up with TCS, Airtel announces pact with Intel to accelerate 5G in India

An exact after a month, Bharti Airtel on Wednesday has announced another partnership with Intel for 5G network development by leveraging vRAN / O-RAN technologies. Earlier in June, Airtel and TCS had announced a strategic partnership for implementing 5G networks solutions for India.

As per Airtel’s filing to exchanges, “The tie-up is part of Airtel’s 5G roadmap for India as it transforms its networks to allow its customers to reap the full possibilities of the hyper-connected world where Industry 4.0 to cloud gaming and virtual/augmented reality become an everyday experience.”

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A Nifty50 heavyweight — Airtel has become the first telecom operator in India to demonstrate 5G over a LIVE network and is conducting 5G trials in major cities.

The telecom major will deploy Intel’s latest 3rd gen Xeon® Scalable processors, FPGAs and eASICs, and Ethernet 800 series across its network to build a solid foundation for rolling out wide-scale 5G, mobile edge computing, and network slicing, the company said in its press statement.

As members of the O-RAN Alliance, Airtel and Intel will work closely for developing a range of Make in India 5G solutions and enabling world-class telecom infrastructure in India through local partners.

Open radio access network (O-RAN) will be an area of tremendous innovation and creativity in the coming years. These O-RAN platforms will leverage Intel FlexRAN, a reference architecture with both software and hardware components, and enable software-based radio base stations that can run on general-purpose servers located at the network edge.

Tata Group has developed a ‘state of the art’ O-RAN-based Radio & NSA/SA Core and has integrated a totally indigenous telecom stack, leveraging the Group capabilities and that of its partners. This will be available for commercial development starting January 2022, Airtel said in a statement on June 21, 2021.