The country’s leading telecommunications provider Bharti Airtel announced on Wednesday, July 21, that it is collaborating with American multinational tech company Intel to accelerate the rollout of the 5G network in India by leveraging the virtualized radio access network (vRAN) as well as O-RAN (open radio access network) technologies. The collaboration between the two leading firms is likely to provide a major 5G network rollout boost in the country.

The joint efforts by Intel and Airtel will evolve the communications network from fixed-function equipment to the virtualized cloud-native deployments. This will enable edge-to-cloud communications to power a hyperconnected world where industry 4.0, cloud gaming and virtual or augmented reality become a daily experience for customers. The collaboration is part of Airtel’s 5G roadmap for the country, according to a statement shared by the telecom operator.

Intel-Airtel Collaboration: How will it work? 

Airtel will deploy Intel’s latest third-generation Xeon Scalable processors, FPGAs and eASICs, and Ethernet 800 series across its network to build a foundation for rolling out a wide-scale 5G network, mobile edge computing, as well as network slicing, according to its statement.