The company has ordered the new network, part of its Project Leap, from Ciena, which will use its photonics technology.
Bharti Airtel CTO Randeep Sekhon said this will be “one of world’s largest optical spine and leaf networks, which is also a big step towards 5G readiness by leveraging our huge fibre assets”.
He added: “Airtel has always pioneered the introduction of cutting-edge network technologies to serve its customers. … This will not only scale our network for massive capacity but also protect traffic and enhance service delivery to all our customers.”
Airtel said that the deployment will enable a network that can quickly respond to simultaneous faults by re-computing and re-routing traffic based on available network resources.
Ryan Perera, vice president and general manager at Ciena India, said: “The combination of Ciena’s coherent optical, advanced software and control plane capabilities gives Bharti a scalable and robust infrastructure that can dynamically adapt to keep up with ever-changing user demands.”
The new backbone architecture will work with data rates of 400Gbps and higher to create a future-proof scalable network, said Airtel. “In addition, the architecture offers lower latency and software-controlled connectivity for cloud infrastructure, faster transformation to virtualised platforms, and 5G readiness.”
The network will also support bandwidth on demand, optical VPNs, latency-based routing and dynamic data centre interconnects.
