Swedish telecom equipment manufacturer Ericsson will supply and deploy 5G-ready solutions for Bharti Airtel, as part of a renewed multi-year contract the two companies signed. This signals that Airtel might not use China’s Huawei’s gear in its 5G network. The companies did not reveal any financial details of the deal. Earlier this year, it was reported that Airtel and Vi (previously Vodafone Idea) had partnered with Huawei to participate in India’s 5G field trials. However, since then, following the clash between India and China at the border, the Indian government has banned over 200 apps developed by Chinese companies, and restricted foreign investment coming from the country. Huawei’s participation in India’s 5G trials was already being met with criticism, and the US had also been waging a global war against the company, calling it a security threat, and pressuring allies into excluding Huawei’s equipment from their 5G networks. Reliance Jio, Airtel and Vi’s competitor, has already said it is ready to deploy 5G network trials in India as soon as spectrum is available, and has boasted that its network doesn’t use a single Chinese component. While so far the Indian government hasn’t ruled out Huawei’s participation in the 5G trials, media reports suggested that it was considering to prohibit Chinese companies from providing telecom equipment to state-run telcos BSNL and MTNL. Then in July, the Department of Telecommunications cancelled a tender for upgrading BSNL’s 4G network, reportedly to exclude Chinese companies from bidding. However, it is worth noting that more than…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...