New Delhi: Alcatel-Lucent is to
help Bharti Airtel meet rapidly growing demand for mobile broadband services in
its African operations by supplying advanced new IP-based networking technology
to support the delivery of new mobile broadband data and video services.
Rising smartphone ownership in Africa is driving demand for
high-bandwidth mobile data services such as video calling and online gaming. To
satisfy this demand and meet continued expansion, Alcatel-Lucent will evolve
Airtel Africa’s data transport and mobile backhaul1 networks using its IP/MPLS
(IP/Multiprotocol Label Switching) technology.
This
new backbone network will support all mobile broadband services to Airtel’s 17
affiliates across Africa – serving 60 million customers - as well as a much
more robust interconnection to global networks including the UK.
The
single international network will offer a more simple structure to improve
performance, reliability, capacity convergence and interoperable mechanisms for
faster service recovery.
The
Airtel investment includes a common platform for Layer 2 and Layer 3 service
provisioning to reduce the time of delivering the variety of service types.
Financialexpress.com