Bharti Airtel launches new 5G business initiative
Bharti Airtel, a communications solutions provider in India, has announced a new initiative to demonstrate a wide range of enterprise-grade use cases using high speed & low latency networks.
As part of the initiative, called #5GforBusiness, Airtel is joining forces with leading global consulting and technology companies such as Accenture, AWS, CISCO, Ericsson, Google Cloud, Nokia, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to work with industry-leading brands such as Apollo Hospitals, Flipkart and several leading manufacturing companies to test 5G based solutions.
Airtel says it will deploy the solutions on a 5G test spectrum allotted to Airtel and include use cases like Smart Factory, Smart Healthcare, 5G powered Quality inspection, Digital Twin, connected frontline workforce, and AR/VR based use cases amongst others.
Randeep Singh Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel, said: “The 5G ecosystem will open limitless possibilities for enterprises to enhance productivity and serve their customers even better with digitally enabled applications. We are delighted to work with our strategic technology partners and some of our enterprise customers to start testing real-life 5G applications of the future. This also offers tremendous learnings across the value chain and lays a solid foundation for future application roadmap.”
Airtel is spearheading 5G in India. Earlier this year Airtel demonstrated India’s first 5G experience over a LIVE 4G network. It has also demonstrated India’s first rural 5G trial as well as the first cloud gaming experience on 5G.
Airtel is also leading the O-RAN Alliance initiatives in India to build 5G solutions. It has already announced partnerships with Tata Group, Qualcomm, Intel, Mavenir and Altiostar.
The enterprise sector
The company is also looking into the enterprise sector. Nxtra, its data centre firm, recently announced an investment of (US$67bn) to triple data centre capacity by 2025.
Indian enterprises are currently going through a period of digital transformation, partly fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. The testing of 5G use cases may be able to explain why telcos have requested an extension of 5G trials until 2021.
