Bharti Airtel Ltd., India’s second-largest wireless carrier, is set to announce a partnership with U.S. telecommunications giant Verizon Communications Inc. as it seeks to expand offerings in the local market.
Blue Jeans, Verizon’s enterprise-grade videoconferencing service in collaboration with Airtel, will offer an integrated audio solution, giving its customers convenient dial-in options to join the meetings. The service will help people communicate and collaborate across mobile, desktop, browser, and conference rooms, while meeting the stringent security needs of banks, health care providers and other organizations.
The offer includes a cloud point of presence in India, enabling low latency and improved quality of service for India-based customers, an official statement said. The technology will be fully integrated with Airtel’s network, including its data centers, to ensure customers are offered a state of the art, reliable and secure customer experience. The company claims that the new platform supports call conferencing with up to 100 people and meetings can go up to 24 hours without any interruption.
Led by billionaire Sunil Mittal, Airtel has more than 320 million wireless phone subscriptions, compared with about 388 million for Jio. Vodafone Idea Ltd. a joint venture between U.K.’s Vodafone Group Plc. and the Aditya Birla Group had about 290 million as of March.
Airtel said the service would be free for users for the first three months after which they would be charged according to the plan. Apart from the enterprises, the application will also be available for individual customers in the future. Airtel, which is a significant player in Africa, may also extend this service in that geography soon.
