Airtel Partners With Meta To Extend Subsea Cable System 2Africa Pearls to India

Telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Monday (December 5) announced a collaboration with Meta Platforms, the parent of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, to support the growth in India’s digital ecosystem and the demand for high-speed internet in the country by enabling the extension of the subsea cable system ‘2Africa Pearls’ to India.

2Africa Pearls is the world’s longest subsea cable system and is expected to provide faster internet connectivity to almost 3 Bn people globally. 

Airtel and Meta will jointly invest in this global connectivity infrastructure to extend the cable to Airtel’s landing station in Mumbai and pick up dedicated capacity to further strengthen its submarine network portfolio. The companies will work with Saudi Telecommunication Company (STC) for the same.

The 2Africa cable will significantly boost India’s cable capacity and empower global businesses to build new integrated solutions and provide a high-quality seamless experience to their customers, the companies said in a statement, adding that foundational connectivity infrastructure is crucial to support India’s rising demand for high-speed data and digital services, particularly with the roll-out of 5G.

“We, at Airtel, are delighted to deepen our partnership with Meta to serve India’s digitally connected economy by leveraging the technology and infrastructure strengths of both companies,” said Vani Venkatesh, CEO, Global Business at Bharti Airtel.

“With our contributions to the 2Africa cable and Open RAN (Radio Access Network), we are investing in crucial and progressive connectivity infrastructure which is needed to support the increasing demand for high-speed data in India,” Venkatesh added.

RAN provides the technology that connects users’ mobile phones to the mobile network over radio waves. Open RAN is the collaboration of various equipment makers and telecom service providers who have a shared goal of solving the interoperability problem by creating standards.

Being members of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Open RAN project group, both Airtel and Meta have been working towards increasing ecosystem diversity while driving innovation and cost-efficiency in connectivity networks. Airtel said that it has also signed an agreement to help increase the operational efficiency of Open RAN and facilitate energy management and automation in radio networks using advanced analytics and AI/ML models. 

Airtel said it is currently conducting trials for 4G and 5G Open RAN solutions on a few sites in Haryana and will commercially deploy the solution across several locations in India over the next few quarters. 

“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,” said Francisco Varela, vice president of mobile partnerships at Meta. 

Besides, Airtel and Meta said they will also invest in communications platform as a service (CPaaS) based new-age digital solutions to support the requirements of Indian customers and enterprises.

Earlier this year, Airtel launched its CPaaS platform Airtel IQ to enable companies to embed encrypted voice calling, SMS, and IVR into their web or mobile applications. 

“Airtel will integrate Meta’s WhatsApp within its CPaaS platform. 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,” the statement said.

It must be noted that Airtel has also launched its 5G network in a few cities of the country and aims to cover the entire country by March 2024 with the next generation services. 

India is an attractive market for Meta which has earlier also invested in the country’s digital and telecom ecosystem. In 2020, the tech giant announced an investment of about $5.7 Bn in Airtel’s rival Reliance Jio. Besides, WhatsApp has also partnered with Reliance’s ecommerce platform JioMart to provide end-to-end shopping experience.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.