Indian operator Bharti Airtel has rolled out a business initiative to demonstrate a wide range of enterprise grade use cases using 5G networks, the telco said in a release.
As part of the #5GforBusiness initiative, Airtel is joining forces with Accenture, AWS, Cisco, Ericsson, Google Cloud, Nokia and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to work with industry brands such as Apollo Hospitals, Flipkart and several leading manufacturing companies to test 5G based solutions.
Airtel noted that these solutions will be deployed on 5G test spectrum awarded 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.
The use case demonstrations will be conducted both at end-user locations and at Airtel’s advanced 5G lab in Manesar (Gurgaon).
Randeep Singh Sekhon, CTO at 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.”
Earlier this year, Airtel demonstrated what it claims to be India’s first 5G experience over a live 4G network.
Last month, Bharti Airtel and Ericsson have conducted what they claim is India’s first 5G network demonstration in a rural geography. The demonstration took place in the village of Bhaipur Bramanan village, on the outskirts of Delhi.
Airtel noted that the trial showcased the potential offered by 5G towards bridging the digital divide by enabling access to high speed broadband through solutions such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) services.
The trial was carried out using 3.5 Ghz mid-band test 5G spectrum — awarded to Airtel by India’s Department of Telecom for the purposes of the trial. Existing FDD spectrum was also used during the trial.
In July, Intel and Bharti Airtel had announced a collaboration to drive network development of 4G and 5G virtualized radio access network (vRAN) and open radio access network (RAN) technology.
Work by Intel and Airtel will evolve communications networks from fixed-function equipment to virtualized cloud-native deployments and enable edge-to-cloud communications.
Airtel’s network will be powered by a number of Intel products, including the latest Xeon Scalable processors, FPGAs and eASICs, Ethernet 800 Series and FlexRAN reference architecture.
Headquartered in India, Airtel is a global communications solutions provider with over 474 million customers in 18 countries across South Asia and Africa.
