The Indian communications solutions provider will also partner with Meta and STC to extend the 2Africa Pearls subsea cable system to India
Airtel and Meta partner to support growth of India’s digital ecosystem. (Credit: Bhartiairtel/Wikipedia.org)
Bharti Airtel (Airtel) and Facebook owner Meta Platforms have entered into a partnership aimed at expediting the digital ecosystem in India.
The two firms will co-invest in global connectivity infrastructure and communications platform as a service (CPaaS) based digital solutions to address the emerging needs of customers and companies in the country.
Consumers in India are expected to be provided with high-quality connectivity and world-class digital services by the partnership.
Airtel will also partner with Meta and STC for bringing the 2Africa Pearls subsea cable system to India.
Meta and Airtel will extend 2Africa Pearls to the latter’s landing station in Mumbai and also pick up dedicated capacity to further bolster its submarine network portfolio.
In addition, the subsea cable system will increase India’s cable capacity and enable global hyper-scalers and enterprises to develop new integrated solutions and offer their consumers with a high-quality seamless experience.
Meta mobile partnerships vice president Francisco Varela 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.”
Presently, Airtel is carrying out trials for 4G and 5G Open RAN solutions on a few sites in Haryana, India.
Over the next few quarters, the company plans to deploy the solution commercially across various locations in India.
In addition, Airtel will integrate Meta’s WhatsApp within its CPaaS platform. The integration will allow businesses to use WhatsApp’s features and reach to provide omni-channel customer engagement to enterprises.
Airtel global business CEO Vani Venkatesh said: “We, at Airtel, are delighted to deepen our partnership with Meta to serve India’s digitally connected economy by leveraging the technology and infrastructure strengths of both companies.
“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. We look forward to working closely with Meta to deliver best-in-class digital experiences to our customers in India.”