Bharti Airtel to Provide Better Experience to Its Customers on 5G Network, Gives Contract to Ericsson

Bharti Airtel, one of the big telecom companies, has plans to improve its network. For this, the company has given a contract worth millions of dollars to telecom equipment maker Ericsson. This contract is for RAN products and solutions related to 4G and 5G.

In this regard, in a filing to the stock exchange, Bharti Airtel has said that this contract given to Ericsson will provide the company’s customers with more coverage and increased capacity on the network. Ericsson will also do software upgrade of Bharti Airtel’s existing 4G radios. Ericsson has about 170 contracts related to 5G in more than 70 countries. It has been working with Airtel for almost 25 years.

Last month, Airtel also gave a contract worth millions of dollars to Finland’s telecom equipment maker Nokia. Nokia had said that this deal includes using equipment from its 5G AirScale portfolio. In this, Airtel’s existing 4G network will also be modernized with multiband radios and baseband equipment. These equipment can also support 5G network. For the last two decades, Airtel has been using Nokia’s telecom equipment to strengthen its network. Airtel may soon buy the direct-to-home (DTH) business of Tata Play. Talks are going on between the two companies for this. However, Tata Play’s DTH service is running in loss. Buying this business will increase the company’s presence in the digital TV segment. The company is facing competition from DishTV and some other companies in this segment.

Recently, Airtel became the best 5G experience provider due to the fastest download and upload speed of its 5G network. The company had secured first position in many categories including download speed, upload speed, live video, video streaming and gaming. The share price of the company has increased in the last few months. A few months ago, Airtel had made a partial payment of Rs 8,465 crore of its dues in the spectrum auction held in 2016. However, the company has not disclosed how much outstanding amount it has to pay after this payment.