Bharti Airtel share price climbs 2% as firm expands network partnership with Nokia

“Nokia and Bharti Airtel are expanding their partnership with the deployment of Nokia’s Packet Core appliance-based and Fixed Wireless Access solutions for providing a better network experience for Airtel’s growing 4G/5G customer base,” Airtel said in a statement to the stock exchanges on Wednesday.

The solution will help seamlessly integrate 5G and 4G technologies into a single set of servers. Nokia’s FWA will provide additional capacities for home broadband and enterprise-critical application services.

Airtel will use Nokia’s automation framework to realise zero-touch service launch and efficient lifecycle management for core network functions to enhance its ability to deliver new services faster while reducing network operational costs.

Following this, shares of Bharti Airtel were trading 1.86% higher at ₹1,308.90 apiece on the National Stock Exchange.

“The rollout covers network automation in a multi-year deal that spans the majority of Airtel’s service regions across the country. The collaboration entails advancing autonomous networks by utilising GenAI for service orchestration and assurance,” Airel further said.

The partnership will also help Airtel optimise its hardware footprint and reduce its cost per bit by utilising appliance-based Packet Core gateways while maintaining the rest of the network elements in a cloud-native architecture.

“Nokia’s innovative Packet Core deployment architecture enables critical changes to our network quality and reliability for meeting the fast-rising growth in customer data requirements,” said Randeep Sekhon, chief technology officer, Bharti Airtel. “This rollout further demonstrates our longstanding success in jointly collaborating to strengthen the overall Airtel customer experience,” he added.

Nokia’s solution provides a pre-integrated and modular server-based configuration for increased flexibility to support a wider range of business and operational deployment models. This allows Airtel to better target new customers and create new revenue streams.

Commenting on the development, Raghav Sahgal, President of Cloud and Network Services at Nokia, said, “Nokia and Airtel have a long-standing partnership, and we are pleased to bolster its 5G SA readiness. Airtel’s use of Nokia’s Packet Core to build greater network agility and reliability demonstrates how we are both helping customers solve problems and furthering Nokia’s leadership position in the Core space in India and around the world.”