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Nokia Corporation NOK recently revealed that it has expanded its collaboration with Bharti Airtel to enhance 4G and 5G network infrastructure across India, leveraging its Packet Core appliances and Fixed Wireless Access solutions.
Digging Deep Into the NOK-Airtel Deal
Nokia’s state-of-the-art infrastructure-agnostic packet core solution offers critical components required for a webscale-class evolved packet core and 5G core system. The solution’s virtualized, cloud-native disaggregated and state-efficient design enables communication service providers to meet the high-performance and capacity demands of edge computing. By leveraging these pre-packaged software units for 5G standalone readiness, Bharti Airtel is set to advance its network toward the next generation of 5G technology.
The solution will likely simplify Airtel’s network architecture, enabling the operator to handle the rapidly increasing demand for data while reducing operational costs. The integration of appliance-based Packet Core gateways will further help Airtel optimize its hardware footprint and reduce its cost per bit while maintaining other network elements in a cloud-native setup.
Bharti Airtel will also benefit from Nokia’s comprehensive portfolio of Fixed Wireless Access solutions that equips operators with a wide range of Wi-Fi devices and FastMile gateways tailored to meet their unique and diverse needs. The deployment will also leverage Nokia’s automation framework to enable zero-touch service launches and optimize lifecycle management for core network functions. These upgrades will help Airtel accelerate the introduction of new services cost-effectively.
Will This Deal Extension Drive NOK Shares?
With the emergence of the smartphone market and subsequent usage of mobile broadband, user demand for coverage speed and quality has recently increased. Further, to maintain superior performance as traffic increases, there is also a continuous need for network tuning and optimization. Nokia’s expertise in mission-critical networks is well-established, with deployments across more than 2,600 leading enterprise customers in the transportation, energy, manufacturing, webscale and public sector segments worldwide.
Being a long-standing partner of Bharti Airtel, the company has been providing several core technologies, including Voice over LTE, Home Subscriber Server, Home Location Register, Unified Data Management and Voice over New Radio, along with automated Management & Orchestration over years. The extension of this partnership will further strengthen Airtel’s customer experience and meet the fast-growing demand for data services.
These advancements are likely to propel the stock with incremental revenue generation and inducement of similar deals from other carriers in the future. The deal is also expected to strengthen Nokia’s position as a leading telecommunications equipment provider in India.