Airtel and Intel team up to accelerate 5G in India

Bharti Airtel and Intel have announced a collaboration to fast-track the move of Airtel’s customer base to 5G by leveraging vRAN and O-RAN technologies. Flexible, software-defined network architecture will allow the operator to offer targeted services and address customer bandwidth and latency requirements by making use of 5G, mobile edge computing and network slicing.

India is the second largest market in the world by number of cellular connections; the country is also seeing rapid uptake in mobile broadband. Amid a fast-changing competitive landscape, Indian operators are now looking to 5G to expand beyond their traditional telecoms businesses and explore new revenue streams.  As such, Airtel and other operators are conducting 5G trials and utilising the Make in India initiative to nurture an ecosystem of home-grown innovation. 5G networks not only offer the potential to transform industrial sectors but also deliver significant social and economic benefits. Over the period 2023–2040, 5G technologies will make an overall contribution of approximately $450 billion to the Indian economy (0.6% of GDP by 2040) as per research by GSMA Intelligence.

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