Bharti Airtel has announced it has partnered with Meta Platforms to support the expansion of India’s digital ecosystem. Airtel and Meta plan to jointly invest in global connectivity infrastructure and CPaaS based new-age digital services for residential customers and enterprises in India. 

Airtel will work with Meta and STC to extend 2Africa Pearls to India. The 2Africa subsea cable system is expected to provide internet connectivity to almost 3 billion people globally. Airtel and Meta plan to extend the cable to Airtel’s landing station in Mumbai and also pick up dedicated capacity to enhance its submarine network portfolio 

Airtel also reports it is conducting trials for 4G and 5G Open RAN services on select sites in the state of Haryana and intends to commercially deploy the solution across several locations in India over the next few quarters. Airtel will share its learnings with wider ecosystem partners within the TIP community, including Meta, to help accelerate the deployment of Open RAN-based networks across the world. 

Airtel also plans to integrate Meta’s WhatsApp within its CPaaS platform. With this integration, businesses are expected to be able to use WhatsApp’s rich features and reach to provide an omni-channel customer engagement to enterprises.

Original article can be seen at: