Airtel partners with Meta to scale India’s digital infrastructure

Bharti Airtel, an Indian telecom major, and Meta Platforms will jointly invest in global connectivity infrastructure and communications platform as a service (CPaaS)- based new-age digital solutions to scale India’s digital infrastructure.

The proposed investment is expected to fund the development of new integrated solutions to provide a high-quality seamless experience to businesses and customers in India.

As India set to roll out 5G networks later this year, basic connectivity infrastructure like subsea cable systems is important to meet the growing demand for high-speed digital and data services.

Airtel will partner with Meta and STC to extend subsea cable system 2Africa Pearls to India for the country’s improved cable capacity and faster internet connectivity.

The 2Africa Pearls subsea cable system will extend to Airtel’s landing station in Mumbai.

Airtel partners with Meta to scale India’s digital infrastructure. Photo courtesy of Shrutuja Shirke/Wikimedia Commons.

Vani Venkatesh — Bharti Airtel Global Business CEO 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.”

As a member of the Telecom Infra Project Open RAN project group, Airtel has agreed to help augment the operational capacity of Open RAN and is currently executing 4G and 5G Open RAN solutions trials in Haryana.

Francisco Varela — Meta mobile partnerships vice president 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.”

Airtel will also integrate Meta’s WhatsApp within its CPaaS platform to provide businesses with an omnichannel customer engagement platform.