Nokia and Bharti Airtel have entered into a multi-year deal to roll out Nokia’s Packet Core appliance-based and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) solutions to provide a better network experience for the telco’s growing 4G/5G customer base. The solution will integrate 5G and 4G technologies into a single set of servers. The collaboration will advance autonomous networks by utilising GenAI for service orchestration and assurance.
Nokia’s FWA will provide additional capacities for home broadband and enterprise-critical application services. Meanwhile, the automation framework will improve core network functions’ ability to deliver new services faster while reducing network operational costs.
The Packet Core solution will be used for 5G standalone (SA) readiness. This will help Airtel optimise its hardware footprint and reduce its cost per bit by utilising appliance-based Packet Core gateways, while maintaining the rest of the network elements in a cloud-native architecture.
“Nokia’s innovative Packet Core deployment architecture enables critical changes to our network quality and reliability for meeting the fast-rising growth in customer data requirements. This rollout further demonstrates our longstanding success in jointly collaborating to strengthen the overall Airtel customer experience,” said Randeep Sekhon, CTO of Airtel.
“Nokia and Airtel have a long-standing partnership and we are pleased to bolster its 5G SA readiness. Airtel’s use of Nokia’s Packet Core to build greater network agility and reliability demonstrates how we are both helping customers solve problems and furthering Nokia’s leadership position in the Core space, in India and around the world,” said Raghav Sahgal, President of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia.
