Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea kept modernising their networks throughout the year despite covid and AGR-led disruption. As per various estimates, a network traffic increase of about 15-20 per cent has forced Indian telcos to expand the network both in terms of coverage and capacity.

Both telcos awarded new business to European gear vendors like Nokia and Ericsson during the year. Notably, Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE saw their business fall dramatically in 2020 due to geo-poloitical reasons.

Airtel

India’s telecom sector, in the efforts of enabling policies including more quantum of the spectrum, is set to establish new benchmarks in the next-generation network deployments and service delivery.

Nokia India head recently told ETTelecom that the gear vendor bagged more than 100 deals in 2020 in the country. One of the biggest contracts was the Airtel 4G expansion deal worth over US$1 billion to deploy a Single RAN solution in nine telecom circles that are Gujarat, Maharashtra, Mumbai, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar, and UP East.

As part of this agreement, Nokia will deploy 300,000 radio units for the next three years to help the telco increase network capacity.

The radio deal was followed by another cloud deal with Airtel. Under the new deal Nokia’s CloudBand-based software products are powering the telco’s Voice over LTE (VoLTE) network in India. The Finnish company powers Airtel’s VoLTE in 22 circles, its European rival Ericsson is providing IMS-based VoLTE in Rajasthan telecom circle.

On November 4, ETTelecom reported that Airtel is likely to soon replace ZTE with Nokia as the main 4G network gear supplier in the Punjab circle for future expansion and modernization.

Bharti Airtel also awarded new business to Swedish telecom gear maker, Ericsson. In July this year, the telco renewed its contract for pan-India managed network operations.

The managed services contract was originally signed in late 2016 to cover Airtel’s 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE networks across all 22 circles across the country. The value was pegged at US$500 million (Rs 3,350 crore) in 2016. Analysts said that the value of the renewed contract will be much lower.

The managed services contract was followed by renewal of 4G network contract in October for eight telecom circles including Rajasthan and rest of Tamil Nadu circles which were previously supported by China’s Huawei.

Despite its association with traditional vendors, the Sunil Mittal-led made efforts on the OpenRan and virtual RAN (vRAN) areas. It partnered with US-based Altiostar to deploy the latter’s software-centric cloud-based architecture open vRAN solution to roll out vRAN based 4G and 5G services, applications, and use cases on its network.

As part of its efforts to position itself as a 5G-ready telco, Airtel in May selected American IT giant IBM and Red Hat to deploy a new telco network Cloud. The deal enabled Airtel to leverage IBM and Red Hat’s portfolio of Hybrid Cloud and cognitive enterprise capabilities to adopt an open cloud architecture based on Red Hat OpenStack.