Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile network operator has announced that it is partnering with Nokia to boost its service quality and operational efficiency through the employment of Nokia’s hybrid self-organising networks (SON) solution.
“Our collaboration with Nokia in taking SON to the next level by integrating it with other data sources and machine learning capabilities. It would enable us to proactively address network performance dips and outages even before a customer experiences them,” Abhay Savargaonkar, director, Networks (India and South Asia) at Bharti Airtel said in a statement.
The solution enables an operator to make proactive decisions for optimisation of network utilisation and better user experience. It employs predictive machine learning which interworks with analytics platform to achieve the purpose. The integration of Airtel’s multiple vendor radio network structure with Nokia’s EdenNet SON software will enhance capabilities through spontaneous identification and resolution of network problems, and real-time management of network capacity.
Sanjay Malik, head of India Market at Nokia commented on the partnership, “We are confident that our proven expertise will enable Airtel to manage complex multi-technology networks by automatically minimising the risk of human error.”
2018 has seen Bharti Airtel announcing a series of strategic alliances. Earlier this month, the company had entered into a collaboration with Hotstar to stream its shows on the Airtel TV app. This will make over 1,00,000 hours of content across nine languages, consisting of Indian cinema, live sports and TV shows across Star Network freely available to users of the Airtel TV App. Later, it announced a partnership with HMD Global to provide affordable 4G smartphones as a part of its ‘Mera Pehla Smartphone’ initiative.
Earlier this week Bharti Airtel had announced that it had entered into a venture called the Seamless Alliance with companies across sectors to provide seamless low-latency and high-speed connectivity inside aircrafts. The alliance has companies from three sections – aircraft manufacturers (US-based airlines Delta and Airbus), in-flight broadband providers (GoGo) and telecom operators (US-based Sprint). The alliance also includes Softbank-backed satellite start-up, OneWeb.
