Bharti Airtel has reportedly selected Mavenir to deploy open radio access network (RAN) technology in the low-revenue generating rural parts of India in a bid to lower its capital expenditure. The telco initially plans to deploy 2,500 sites on open RAN and scale the deployment to 10,000 sites over time.
According to industry sources, Airtel is driving forward open RAN deployment into its rural markets. It is a 4G/5G overlay using a stack build in India. The disaggregation of the radio using open technologies will benefit the total cost of ownership.
