Bharti Airtel, TCS enter strategic partnership to develop 5G in India

On June 21, Bharti Airtel and Tata Group announced a strategic partnership for implementing the 5G network solutions in India. The companies stated that Airtel will pilot and deploy its indigenous plan as a part of its 5G network solutions in India. It will start its pilot in January 2022, as per the guidelines from the Government of India. Tata has developed a state of the art O-RAN-based Radio and NSA/SA Core and has integrated an indigenous telecom stack, leveraging the Group capabilities and that of its partner. It will be available for commercial development from January 2022, the statement said. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) brings its expert global system integration and help to align end-to-end solutions for 3GPP and O-RAN-based standards since the networks and equipment are increasingly embedded in the software. According to the statement, the 'Made in India' 5G solutions are aligned to global standards and interoperate with other products of their standard defined by the ORAN Alliance. Once the 5G solutions are commercially proved by Airtel and the brownfield network, it will be open to export for India, which is the second-largest telecom market in the world. MD and CEO of Bharti Airtel, Gopal Vittal, said that with the Tata Group, they would make India a 5G hub for allied technologies. Its world-class technology ecosystem and talent pool will serve India to be positioned to build cutting edge solutions for the world. It will also provide India with a massive innovation and manufacturing centre. Airtel is a Board Member of the ORAN Alliance, will explore and implement O-RAN-based networks in India. This year Airtel became the first telecom company in India to demonstrate a 5G live network in Hyderabad. It will start its 5G trials in major cities using the spectrum allocated by the Department of Telecom. Image Source Also read: Jio to develop largest international submarine cable system Also read: Reliance Jio buys more than half of telecom spectrum sold