Meta’s 2Africa Pearls will connect to Airtel’s landing in Mumbai, extending the world’s longest subsea cable
Even as Indian telco Bharti Airtel continues its aggressive 5G rollout across the country, the company is looking for other ways to expand its reach with digital transformation services for Indian consumers and enterprises. To that end, Airtel and Meta announced a new partnership this week that the companies say will help to grow India’s digital ecosystem. The companies said they’re working together to extend a subsea cable system, increase Open RAN use and research, and expand Airtel’s Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) offerings.
Meta’s 2Africa Pearls lays claim to being the longest subsea cable in the world, stretching almost 28,000 miles (45,000 kilometers). It connects Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia with 16 fiber pairs with a nominal capacity of 180 terabits (Tb) per second. Once completed, Meta says 2Africa Pearls will provide connectivity for an estimated 3 billion people. Airtel said it’s working with Meta and another member of the 2Africa consortium, Saudi Telecom Company (STC), to extend 2Africa Pearls to Airtel’s Mumbai facilities.
“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,” said Airtel.
First announced in May 2020, 2Africa Pearls is a still a work in progress — it’s expected to be finished and completely operational sometime in 2023. 2Africa made its first landing (of 46) in April of this year in Genoa, Italy, connecting to Equinix’s Carrier Neutral Data Center (CNDC). Since then, the cable has also reached Barcelona, Spain and Marseille, France. The Meta-led consortium behind Africa 2Pearls announced plans to extend the subsea cable system to India in September, with Airtel revealing itself as a partner in the program this week.
Airtel also noted that it’s working with Meta as part of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Open RAN project group. The company said it’s working on advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) models to improve operational efficiency, energy management and automation in radio networks. The company is conducting Open RAN trails for 4G and 5G Open RAN solutions in the Indian state of Haryana, with plans to deploy the solutions commercially in several Indian states over the next few calendar quarters.
“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,” said the telco.
Airtel claimed Open RAN primacy in India earlier this year when it said it was the first Indian telco to achieve Open RAN-based live 5G network validation. The Non-Standalone (NSA) network test employed Mavenir’s Open vRAN solution and was conducted in the 3,500 megahertz (MHz) band test spectrum allotted to Airtel by India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT). Speeds of over 1 Gbps were validated with the equipment deployed and configured in Non-Standalone (NSA) mode and using commercially available 5G mobile devices, the company said.
Airtel IQ, the telco’s Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) offering, is also getting a modest Meta-related boost, the companies said. Airtel IQ is a cloud communications suite for enterprises that Airtel claims to be the world’s first network network-integrated CPaaS ecosystem. The platform combines voice, messaging, video and customer relationship management capabilities together. Airtel announced that it will integrate Meta’s popular WhatsApp within Airtel IQ.
“With this integration, businesses will now be able to use WhatsApp’s rich features and reach to provide an unparalleled omni-channel customer engagement to enterprises,” said Airtel.
