Bharti Goes With Alcalu For IPfication

In an effort to deliver faster mobile broadband speeds, India's largest operator Bharti Airtel Ltd. has selected Alcatel-Lucent to supply Carrier Ethernet Network (CEN) equipment for its IP-based backhaul network.

The IP-based network, which will also support the operator's fixed broadband services, will allow Bharti Airtel to address the surging bandwidth requirements of customers who are accessing data, video and Internet services on an array of devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, states press release.

The Indian telcos have been working hard to increase their data revenue and recent reductions in 3G tariffs and the launch of 4G services by Bharti Airtel are likely to stimulate the further uptake of data services in the country. To cope with the expected increase in data traffic, operators are working on the "IPfication" of their networks to help them offer better quality broadband services. (See 4 Cheers For Bharti!, and Bharti's Recipe For Network Success.)

The key elements of the Bharti Airtel backhaul network are Alcatel-Lucents 7750 Service Router, 7705 Service Aggregation Router (SAR) and 5620 Service Aware Manager.

"Given the exponential growth in the uptake of data in India, we thought it is the right time for us to transition to a scalable IP-based access network for reasons of both cost and performance," stated Jagbir Singh, Director Network Services Group, Bharti Airtel.

Other operators in India are also investing in IP-based transport infrastructure to deal with the growing volumes of data traffic, with Vodafone India, Idea Cellular Ltd. and Sistema Shyam TeleServices Ltd. also migrating to packet-friendly infrastructure. (See Anil Tandan: CTO, Idea Cellular and Ashwini K Khillan: CTO, MTS India.)

Alcatel-Lucent competes with vendors such as Ciena Corp., Ericsson AB, Nokia Siemens Networks, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Tejas Networks India Ltd., Tellabs Inc., ZTE Corp. and others in the backhaul infrastructure market. (See India's Backhaul Challenge.)

Gagandeep Kaur, Editor, Light Reading India