Road to Network Cloudification: India

“ Road to Network Cloudification” : Series focusing on summarizing the virtualization journey so far, current status & 5G related news of some of the major Operators in a region/country.

In the last article we had looked at US & Canada. In this post we are now looking into India .

Last Updated: 4th Jan 2022.

1. Bharti Airtel:

• Virtualization Journey/Status:
• Airtel started virtualizing their network around 2015/16 time frame and by 2016 had completely virtualized its physical networks using VMWARE NSX.
• SK Telecom partnered with Bharti Airtel(India) in 2017 to jointly work for 5G, NFV, SDN and IoT. Both organizations will work on the standards and enabling ecosystem for introduction of these technologies from Indian perspective.
• In 2019, Airtel selected Ericsson’s 5G Ready Cloud Packet Core to boost existing network Performance.
• Also, in 2020 Altiostar’s open vRAN solution was selected by Airtel for their existing 4G customers & extending same for future 5G use.
• In July 2020, Airtel, under its cloudification strategy, selected Nokia’s CloudBand software to power the telco’s Voice over LTE (VoLTE) network in India. The solution will also help Airtel to create new revenue opportunities for 5G and internet-connected devices.
• 5G News:
• Airtel has signed deals with Cisco & Nokia for laying 5G infrastructure in India.Cisco will be helping with developing a programmable and software defined platform for mobile traffic growth.Nokia will be deploying 30000 radio units across several spectrum for 5G connectivity which is expected to complete by 2022.
• In May2020, Airtel has selected IBM & Red Hat to build 5G Ready Open hybrid Telco Cloud network which would be capable of supporting both network workloads as well as containerized workloads. The hybrid cloud would be combination of Red Hat Openstack & Red Hat Openshift to provide necessary support.
• Airtel has joined hands in January with Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson and Nokia for 5G trials in the country.
• 5G Trials in the country were expected to start in June 2020 for 3 month period . 5G Launch is expected in the country around Mid/End of 2021 time frame.
• The vendors for 5G may change if the Indian government decides that Chinese vendors like Huawei & ZTE are not allowed to participate in the 5G trials.
• Like Jio, Airtel is also planning to develop in house 5G gear.
• Dot approved 5G Trials in May 2021 with Airtel permitted to use Nokia & Ericsson.
• In July 2021, Airtel 5G trial network went live in Mumbai & in October Airtel conducted first rural geography test of 5g in outskirts of Delhi/NCR (Gurgaon) using Ericsson RAN & showed 1Gbps download speeds.
• Further, Airtel confirmed that it had conducted first 5G trial in 700Mhz band with Nokia in Nov 2021 in outskirts of Kolkata.

2. Vi (Previously known as Vodafone Idea Ltd(VIL):

• Virtualization Journey/Status:
• Vodafone Idea is a recently formed merged entity in 2018 between Vodafone India & Idea Cellular. As of September 2020, the company got rebranded to Vi . P.S the article is written prior to rebranding.
• Before merger, in 2017 Vodafone group had selected VMWare as one of the vendors for NFV Global rollout.
• Similarly, before merger Idea Cellular had chosen Nokia’s cloud core to run both data and voice traffic and eventually support 5G.
• The Merged Entity Vodafone Idea Ltd. started their NFV SDN trials towards end of 2018 and in 2019 decided to use Ericsson’s Cloud Packet core offering to support their existing data demands and 5G in future.
• Also VIL’s IMS VoLTE was deployed using Mavenir’s cloud native solution for their 4G & 5G core.
• In 2019, VIL decided to setup a universal cloud for Network & IT workloads. VIL partnered with Cisco to build an automated multi cloud network for its retail and enterprise customers.
• VIL also selected IBM and Red Hat to build, operate, automate and orchestrate the Network Cloud for both VMs and container traffic and by 2020 the Open Hybrid Universal cloud was live supporting nearly 300 million subscribers in production.
• VIL also deployed Open RAN for its 4G offering and in 2020 expanded its RAN pool to include Mavenir’s Open RAN as well.
• As of 2020, Vi has more than 88 Telco Clouds installed in India as told by CTO Vishant Vora during #ETDigitalTelco Round table and has both Network & IT workloads running on the Cloud
• 5G News:
• In 2020, VIL has signed deal with Ericsson & Nokia for laying 5G infrastructure in India.
• Vodafone Idea has also filed its application for 5G trials and the company has partnered Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson and Nokia for the same
• 5G Trials in the country were expected to start in June 2020 for 3 month period . 5G Launch is expected in the country around Mid/end of 2021 time frame.
• The vendors for 5G may change if the Indian government decides that Chinese vendors like Huawei & ZTE are not allowed to participate in the 5G trials.
• Dot approved 5G Trials in May 2021, with Vodafone permitted to use Nokia & Ericsson.
• In November 2021, Vi conducted 5G Trials in Pune & Gandhinagar clocking 1.5Gbps speeds & also carried out 5G trials in rural area of Gandhinagar using Nokias Airscale radio portfolio and achieved more than 100Mbps.

3. Reliance Jio :

• Virtualization Journey/Status:
• Reliance Jio started its operations in 2016 as a Greenfield operator and deployed a fully virtualized network.
• Jio’s all IP network was built using Cisco’s SDN offerings and without any circuit switches.
• Other vendors who contributed towards setting up of Jio’s fully virtual greenfield network included Samsung, Mavenir, Nokia, Oracle & Ciena.
• Jio leveraged open source and customized them to suit its need. Jio’s virtual functions were deployed on Openstack infrastructure from Mirantis which has inbuilt kubernetes support for containers & built an in house MANO solution using ONAP.
• It also built its SDN controller using ONOS & OpenDaylight
• In 2018, in order to expedite capability building towards 5G & IoT deployment, Reliance Jio also acquired Radisys.
• 5G News:
• At India Mobile Congress(IMC) 2019 Jio had demoed 4G LTE & 5G use cases along with Samsung.
• In Oct 2019, Jio replaced Nokia & Oracle’s IMS solution with in house solution.
• Reliance Jio had filed its application for 5G trials initially along with Samsung. However in March 2020, they announced that they have developed an in house 5G and IoT solution to remove dependencies on foreign vendors & reduce costs.
• 5G Trials in the country were expected to start in June 2020 for 3 month period . 5G Launch is expected in the country around Mid/End of 2021 time frame. However Jio had reported in 2018 that they maybe able to launch 5G in the country within 6 months of spectrum auction.
• In July 2020 Jio entered 5G space as technology vendor planning to take its 5G in house solution globally to telcos to compete with existing players like Nokia, Ericsson & Huawei.
• In May 2021, Dot has approved 5G Trials with Jio finalizing to test with Samsung, Nokia , Ericsson & in house products
• Jio kicked off 5G trials in June 2021. They trialed using made in India in house products in Mumbai, using Ericsson in Delhi, Nokia in Pune and Samsung in Gujarat.

Note: This series is taken from my other blog and on it I have another post with summary table capturing all regions, the operators from the posts in this series and their NFV ecosystem/5G status.
URL: https://matelecom.blogspot.com/2020/08/road-to-network-cloudification-summary-table.html

Disclaimer: The details presented above is based on data available online.The references used are available on: https://matelecom.blogspot.com/p/references-road-to-network_18.html