Bharti Airtel gets ready to take on Reliance Jio in 5G vRAN space

Tech to be tested once spectrum is available

Bharti Airtel is set to take on Reliance Jio in its quest to build its own 5G virtualised radio access open network (vRAN) in India. The Sunil Mittal-run company, which is working with the United States-based Altiostar, plans to test the  latter’s open RAN software architecture once trial spectrum is made available by the government to the company.

Talks are also on between Bharti Airtel and Tech Mahindra, one of the shareholders in Altiostar, to play the role of a systems integrator  in harmonising software and hardware in the network bought from different vendors for both the 4G and 5G open RAN solutions.

Bharti Airtel is using vRAN technology to deploy small cells as well as massive MIMO as an overlay on its current 4G networks.  The two companies are also co-designing software in some key areas for the new age networks.

And the plan is to work on the use of this technology not only in India but in Bharti’s telecom networks in other areas of the world such as Africa.   

Altiostar has tied up with Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten and has provided the technology to commercially launch the world’s first open radio access network (O-RAN) 5G network in Japan next month.     

The move by Bharti Airtel is significant as it comes on the heels of Reliance Jio announcing that it has developed its own open RAN 5G network for which it wants to undertake trial runs in Delhi and Mumbai on its network. It has also asked for relevant spectrum to undertake the trial runs.

Further, Reliance Jio too wants to sell its 5G network solution across the world.

Thierry Maupile, executive vice president and chief of strategy and project management in Altiostar, who has worked with Tech Mahindra and Cisco, said: “Altiostar is building the software architecture for 4G as well as 5G on vRAN for Bharti Airtel. It will help Bharti Airtel in competing with Reliance Jio which is doing the same thing,” said Maupile.

He added that the  open solutions for small cells and massive MIMO are already being overlaid on the existing Airtel 4G network in dense locations in cities as well as well as rural locations. “Once spectrum is available for 5G, we will together test our vran 5G solutions too. We are also helping Airtel with the validation of their hardware and software. And in many areas, we are also co-designing software,” said Maupile.   

Maupile confirmed that talks are on with Tech Mahindra to help the operator in system integration.   He pointed out that the collaboration is not limited to India but will extend to working on vRAN in Bharti Airtel’s telecom ventures in other markets.

Maupile said the advantage for operators is that it helps in reducing capital costs. According to analysts, the savings are around 40 per cent for capital costs and 34 per cent for operating costs.

Responding to questions as to whether 2G and 3G networks can work in tandem with open RAN, Maupile said that while vRAN has been developed only for 4G and 5G, they can co-exist. However, he expects operators to move quickly and upgrade to 4G. Maupile expects that legacy carriers will obviously want to protect the investments already made in  their 4G networks.  But the trend currently, he believes, is that all operators looking at upgrades to their 4G network or hoping to enhance capacity, are increasingly using open radio access network solutions.