The past one year was a busy one for telecom players in the Indian market as they entered into contracts to upgrade and modernise networks and make them 4G enabled and 5G ready. Operators such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL) and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) signed contracts with leading telecom equipment vendors in order to boost their networking capabilities and increase their scope of services. Some operators also tied up with their peers and signed intra-circle roaming agreements.
Riding on the government’s Digital India initiative, telecom companies collaborated with various state governments to provide free public Wi-Fi services in cities. Some companies also partnered with the state governments for the development of communications infrastructure under the Smart Cities Mission.
Giving an impetus to its payments bank, Bharti Airtel collaborated with various petroleum companies to provide access to digital banking at petrol pumps. Meanwhile, BSNL collaborated with MobiKwik to launch and co-develop its own mobile payments wallet to encourage digital payment usage.
Going forward, as VoLTE and future-ready 5G technologies take centre stage, the industry will witness several collaborations around machine-to-machine and internet of things (IoT) technologies to meet the growing data demand in one of the largest telecom markets in the world.
A look at some of the key partnership deals during 2017…
