Bharti Airtel to Expand its 5G Network With Fast Speed, Gives Billions of Dollars Equipment Contract to Nokia

Bharti Airtel, one of the big telecom companies, has prepared to expand its 5G network. For this, Airtel has given a contract worth millions of dollars to Finland’s telecom equipment maker Nokia. Nokia said that this deal includes using equipment from its 5G AirScale portfolio.

Airtel has told the stock exchange in a filing that the company plans to increase its coverage and capacity. For this, this contract has been given to Nokia. This also includes modernizing Airtel’s existing 4G network with multiband radios and baseband equipment. These equipment can also support 5G network. For the last two decades, Airtel has been using Nokia’s telecom equipment to strengthen its network. Airtel may soon buy the direct-to-home (DTH) business of Tata Play. Talks are going on between the two companies for this. However, Tata Play’s DTH service is running in loss. Buying this business will increase the company’s presence in the digital TV segment. The company is facing competition from DishTV and some other companies in this segment.

Recently, Airtel had made a partial payment of Rs 8,465 crore of its dues in the spectrum auction held in 2016. However, the company has not disclosed how much outstanding amount it has to pay after this payment. A few months ago, the Supreme Court had rejected the telecom companies’ request for recalculation of the amount due to the government. After this, Airtel has paid some part of its outstanding amount.

The company had said that the payment of more than Rs 84 billion made to the Telecom Department included an interest rate of 9.3 percent. In the first quarter of the current financial year, it had fully paid the spectrum fees for 2012 and 2015. The company’s shares have also risen in the last few months. Airtel became the best 5G experience provider due to the fastest download and upload speed of its 5G network. The company had secured first position in many categories including download speed, upload speed, live video, video streaming and gaming.