Airtel launches initiative to showcase 5G use cases for enterprises

India's second-largest telecom company Bharti Airtel has rolled out ‘5Gforbusiness’ initiative to showcase 5G products to enterprises. 

The initiative will demonstrate case studies and testing of 5G solutions for high speed and low latency networks.   

Airtel said it has joined hands with a myriad of technology companies such as Cisco, AWS, Ericsson, Nokia, Tata Consultancy Services and Accenture, to deploy and test 5G solutions to clients such as Apollo Hospitals, Flipkart and a host of other buyers. 

“We are delighted to work with our strategic technology partners and some of our enterprise customers to start testing real life 5G applications of the future. This also offers tremendous learnings across the value chain and lays a solid foundation for future application roadmap,” said Randeep Singh Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel. 

Deployed on the 5G test spectrum allotted to Airtel in May this year by the Department of Telecommunications (DOT), the use cases will revolve around solutions such as smart factories, smart healthcare, digital twins, connected frontline workforces and Augmented Reality/ Virtual Reality based use cases. 

While some of the demonstration will occur at end-user locations, a few will also be showcases at Airtel’s 5G Lab/ Network Experience Centre located at Manesar in Gurgaon.   

Earlier last month, Airtel said it was able to realise speeds of 100mbps as part of a rural 5G pilot undertaken by the telco and Swedish networking and telecommunications company, Ericsson. 

On September 30, 2021, Airtel also announced a big push for datacenters, the company plans to invest Rs. 5000 crores into its datacenter business, and triple its data center capacity by 2025. 

According to September media reports, the auctions for 5G were to be held in February 2022.   

“Most probably February of 2022...I think by January also, we can try," said Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.