Juniper to supply routers for Airtel’s broadband expansion plans

Telecom major Airtel has expanded its partnership with Sunnyvale, California-based networking solutions provider Juniper Networks to provide network updates to Airtel’s broadband expansion plans in the country.  

 As part of the deal, Juniper networks will supply and install upgrades to the MX series of routers and line cards, to manage subscribers and services. Juniper will also help with carrier-grade network address transmission (CGNAT), for secure encryptions across networks.   

NAT refers to the process of mapping an IP address into another to modify network address information when in transit across a routing device. The technique helps avoid the need for assigning a new address when a network needs to be moved.   

Airtel has currently expanded its broadband coverage to about 430 towns and it plans to cover about 30 million households spanning 2,000 cities over the next three years, the telecom major said in statement.  

Also Read: Airtel hikes prepaid mobile tariffs; minimum plan to cost Rs 99 now

Juniper has already been providing networking solutions to Airtel over the past 15 years, helping them with broadband and ISP networks.   

“As Airtel gears up their network for 5G, we are excited to continually contribute towards their network transformation, not just in support of their fiber-to-the-home broadband services expansion, but also for other use cases and applications across various business segments,” said Sajan Paul, Managing Director & Country Manager, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks.   

Separately, Airtel has been carrying out 5G trials and solutions for different industries over the past few weeks.  On November 1, Airtel announced that it will showcase case studies, along with testing of 5G solutions for high speed and low latency networks.

Called as the “5Gfor business initiative” Airtel partnered with myriad of companies such as Cisco, AWS, Ericsson, Nokia, Tata Consultancy Services and Accenture, to test and deploy 5G solutions. Some of the companies it has trailed 5g include Apollo Hospitals, Flipkart and others.