Airtel, Meta join hands to accelerate India’s digital ecosystem

With the constant endeavour to augment the nation’s infrastructure, Airtel will partner with Meta and STC to extend 2Africa Pearls to India.

2Africa is the world’s longest subsea cable system and is expected to provide faster internet connectivity to almost three billion people globally.

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Airtel and Meta will extend the cable to Airtel’s landing station in Mumbai and also pick up dedicated capacity to further strengthen its submarine network portfolio. The 2Africa cable will significantly boost India’s cable capacity and empower global hyper-scalers and businesses to build new integrated solutions and provide a high-quality seamless experience to customers, the release read.

Francisco Varela, vice president of mobile partnerships for Meta said, “Subsea cables and open, disaggregated networks continue to play a huge role in the foundational infrastructure needed to support network capacity and fuel innovation. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Airtel to further advance the region’s connectivity infrastructure that will enable a better network experience for people and businesses across India.”

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Airtel has signed an agreement to help increase operational efficiency of Open RAN and facilitate energy management and automation in radio networks using advanced analytics and AI/ML models.

Airtel is currently conducting trials for 4G and 5G Open RAN solutions on select sites in the state of Haryana and will commercially deploy the solution across several locations in India over the next few quarters. According to the release, Airtel will share its learnings with wider ecosystem partners within the TIP community, including Meta, to help accelerate the deployment of Open RAN-based networks across the world.