Bharti Airtel, India’s leading telecommunications services provider, IN ASSOCIATION WITH Ciena’s (NYSE: CIEN) coherent optical and intelligent software platforms to build one of the World’s Largest Photonic Control Plane networks in India.
Bharti Airtel Limited is a leading global telecommunications company with operations in 18 countries across Asia and Africa. Headquartered in New Delhi, India, the company ranks amongst the top 3 mobile service providers globally in terms of subscribers. In India, the company’s product offerings include 2G, 3G and 4G wireless services, mobile commerce, fixed line services, high speed home broadband, DTH, enterprise services including national & international long distance services to carriers. In the rest of the geographies, it offers 2G, 3G, 4G wireless services and mobile commerce. Bharti Airtel had over 403 million customers across its operations at the end of Dec 2018.
The network would span 130,000 km and connect 4,000-plus towns across India. Telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Monday said it will deploy Ciena’s optical and software platforms to build one of the world’s “largest” photonic control plane networks in India for ultra-fast data services.
“Airtel has an established reputation for embracing innovative technology to enrich the lives of its subscribers. The combination of Ciena’s coherent optical, advanced software and control plane capabilities gives Bharti a scalable and robust infrastructure that can dynamically adapt to keep up with ever-changing user demands.”
The network will provide data services over 4G, 5G and FTTH, Airtel said in a statement.
It would span 130,000 km and connect 4,000-plus towns across India.
“We will work with Ciena to build one of world’s largest optical spine and leaf networks, which is also a big step towards 5G readiness… This will not only scale our network for massive capacity but also protect traffic and enhance service delivery to all our customers,” Bharti Airtel CTO Randeep Sekhon said.
Photonics combined with advanced software intelligence enables a smart and agile network that allows simplified provisioning of end-to-end network wavelengths, speed and capability to handle multiple fiber failures, the statement said.
Airtel’s new latest technology will become the backbone of network that will serve the ever increasing demand for high-speed data services in India and abroad. It will also enable super-fast broadband experiences over 4G/5G/FTTH architectures, making the most effective and efficient use of available fiber resources. The deployment is part of Project Leap. Airtel’s network transformation program and will also help other networks that can quickly respond to simultaneous faults by re-computing and re-routing traffic based on available network resources.