Airtel partners with Nokia to improve its operational efficiency and service quality

Bharti Airtel, one of the major telecom service providers in India, has now announced that it is partnering with Nokia to deploy the Finnish company's hybrid self-organizing networks (SON) solution to improve its operational efficiency and service quality.

"Our collaboration with Nokia in taking SON to the next level by integrating it with other data sources and ML capabilities enables us to proactively address network performance dips and outages even before a customer experiences them," Abhay Savargaonkar, Director-Networks (India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel, said in a statement.

Nokia's SON solution comprises Nokia EdenNet SON software integrated with Airtel's multi-vendor radio network fabric, improves network performance by automatically identifying and resolving network issues and managing network capacity in real-time.

The solution uses predictive Machine Learning (ML) and interworks with analytics platforms, enabling the operator to take proactive action to optimize network utilization and improve the user experience.

"We are confident that our proven expertise will enable Airtel to manage complex multi-technology networks by automatically minimizing the risk of human error," said Sanjay Malik, Head of India Market, Nokia.

Apart from this, Airtel and HMD Global had previously announced their partnership to offer affordable 4G smartphone options to customers as part of Airtel's 'Mera Pehla Smartphone' initiative.
With the partnership, Nokia 3 and Nokia 2, 4G smartphones have been made available with an attractive cashback offer of Rs. 2,000 from Airtel.

Both 4G smartphones are said to come bundled with a special Airtel recharge pack of Rs. 169 where customers will be getting 1GB 4G data per day and unlimited calling - Local and STD.

The cashback benefit of Rs. 2,000 will be given to customers in two installments over 36 months. A customer will need to make Airtel prepaid recharges worth Rs. 3,500 within the 18 months to be eligible for the first cashback installment of Rs. 500. Similarly, another set of recharges worth Rs. 3,500 over the next 18 months will make the customer eligible for the second installment of Rs. 1,500.