Airtel has deployed Ciena’s 600G and 800G photonic technology in metro cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkata to increase fiber optic network capacity by up to three times.
July 02, 2021
Bharti Airtel has deployed Ciena’s 600G and 800G photonic technology in metro cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkata to increase fiber optic network capacity by up to three times to deliver an enhanced 5G experience once the telco is ready to launch commercial 5G services in the country. The deployment will also support high-growth cloud applications while lowering the cost per bit.
Increasing optic fibre capacity is considered a significant step by the telecom industry in the run-up to rolling out 5G services considering that data being carried over the network will witness a huge spike triggered by connected devices, IoT, new 5G use cases, among others.
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As reported in a leading daily, both companies had entered into an alliance in January 2020 to deploy Ciena’s coherent optical and intelligent software platforms to create one of the largest Photonic Control Plane networks in India.
“Airtel was the country’s first telco to demonstrate live 5G service over a commercial network. As we work to deploy 5G more widely, Ciena plays an integral role in providing an agile network foundation to satisfy our customers’ dynamic requirements,” said Randeep Sekhon, CTO of Bharti Airtel.
To be sure, Airtel has also made its 5G trial network live in Gurgaon’s Cyber Hub in the Millennium city powered by Swedish Ericsson’s 5G gear. It last week entered into a strategic partnership with Tata Group to deploy Open-RAN-based 5G radio and core solutions, which the latter has developed locally.
The Sunil Mittal-led telco said that it will pilot and deploy this indigenous solution developed as part of its 5G rollout plans in India and start the pilot in January 2022.
Earlier this year, the telco said that its network has end-to-end capabilities to support and launch commercial 5G services. It had also demonstrated live 5G using licensed spectrum in the 1800 MHz band in Hyderabad.
“The future of data consumption across India is at the edge – in homes, trains, hospitals, automobiles, factories and many other mission-critical environments. By investing in its metro network with Ciena’s industry-leading technology, Airtel is ideally positioned to support the booming digital economy,” added Ryan Perera, Vice President and General Manager, Ciena India.
To improve resiliency and service availability caused due to fibre cuts, Airtel has implemented a self-optimizing network design using C&L-band infrastructure with Layer 0 control plane with Ciena’s 6500 Reconfigurable Line System (RLS).
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At the same time, Ciena’s Liquid Spectrum PinPoint OTDR software analytics will allow the Sunil Mittal-led telco to localize, troubleshoot, and repair fiber faults. Additionally, to maximize network efficiency and enable high-bandwidth services, Airtel has deployed WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics along with Manage, Control, and Plan (MCP) domain controller.
