Nokia, Airtel ink 5G pact

Finnish telecom major Nokia and Bharti Airtel on Wednesday announced their collaboration to create a strategic roadmap for network evolution to the 5G technology standard and management of connected devices.

Under a new agreement, Nokia and Airtel will collaborate to drive the definition and development of these new services with focus on taking the path to 5G network connectivity, a joint statement said.

The said effort is aimed at building on 4G in an efficient way in terms of power, operations, and cost-effectiveness, and reliability.

“5G promises to enable dramatic improvements in peak data speeds, network latency and agility, as well as the ability to enable new capabilities such as network slicing,  a joint statement said.
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This will allow operators to support a growing number of customers and potentially billions of connected IoT devices with consistent quality of service, laying the foundation for smarter cities and rural communities, connected vehicles, industrial automation, remote healthcare and a myriad of business possibilities,” a joint statement said.

Nokia and Airtel will leverage the former’s 5G FIRST end-to-end solution, including AirScale radio access portfolio and AirFrame data centre platform, to demonstrate 5G capabilities and simulate use cases of 5G extreme broadband and ultra-reliability and low latency communication.

“After our successful association with Bharti Airtel for 2G, 3G and 4G technologies, we are proud to partner to prepare for the future of mobile networks. We will leverage our global experience in 5G-related industry projects and collaborations to enable Bharti Airtel to prepare their networks for greater capacity, coverage and speed,” Nokia Head of India Market Sanjay Malik said.

According to Bharti Airtel Director (Network Services — India & South Asia) Abhay Savargaonkar, “5G and IoT applications have tremendous potential to transform lives and we are pleased to partner with Nokia to enable these future technologies for our customers.”