Bharti Airtel, Alcatel-Lucent Form Managed Services JV

Bharti Airtel and Alcatel-Lucent have formed a joint venture to manage Bharti Airtel’s pan-India broadband and telephone services and help Airtel’s transition to next-generation networks. Under the joint venture, Alcatel-Lucent will design, plan, deploy, optimise and manage Bharti Airtel’s broadband and telephone network across India. A new legal entity is being formed, which will be operated by Alcatel-Lucent.

Manoj Kohli, CEO and joint managing director, Bharti Airtel, said, “This joint venture is another step towards Bharti Airtel’s vision to continuously redefine the benchmarks of customer experience. We will leverage Alcatel-Lucent’s global expertise in IP transformation and network management, which will allow us to focus on customer delivery and market growth”.

“It will also help us accelerate performance as we migrate to next-generation networks for our broadband and telephone customers, opening the door to advanced services and applications,” he added.

“We appreciate the opportunity that Bharti Airtel has given us to demonstrate our experience in network transformation, managed network services and IP transformation,” said Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent.

This Managed Services partnership will include all end-to-end activities – service rollout, installation and fault repair, service continuity and transformation. It will support Bharti Airtel’s transformation to next-generation networks, offering advanced services like high-speed Internet, triple play, media-rich VAS, MPLS, VPN for both retail and business customers. The partnership will also drive optimal capital investment and increase operational efficiency by moving voice and data traffic onto a single, ‘packetised’ infrastructure.