"Airtel and Meta will jointly invest
in global connectivity infrastructure and CPaaS (communications platform as a
service) based new-age digital solutions to support the emerging requirements
of customers and enterprises in India," the statement said.
As part of the collaboration, Airtel will
partner with Meta and STC (Saudi Telecom Company), to extend the world's
longest subsea cable system, 2Africa Pearls, to India.
The plan to extend 2Africa Pearls to India
was announced by Meta in September 2021.
Under the collaboration, 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 statement said.
Airtel will also integrate Meta's WhatsApp
within its CPaaS platform. With this integration, businesses will now be able
to use WhatsApp and reach to provide omnichannel customer engagement to
enterprises.
"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.
With our contributions to the 2Africa cable and Open RAN, we are investing in
crucial and progressive connectivity infrastructure which is needed to support
the increasing demand for high-speed data in India," Bharti Airtel, CEO
for global business, Vani Venkatesh said.
Airtel and Meta are members of the Telecom
Infra Project (TIP) Open RAN project group. Airtel has signed an agreement to
help increase operational efficiency of Open RAN (radio access network) and
facilitate energy management and automation in radio networks using advanced
analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning 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, the statement said.
"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," Meta, vice president of mobile partnerships,
Francisco Varela said.