MWC2018: Airtel expands Cisco SON partnership in India

Bharti Airtel has expanded its Self Optimisation Networks (SON) partnership with networking major Cisco to improve customer experience.

Abhay Savargaonkar, director, Networks, Bharti Airtel said that the telco is now taking SON to next level by integrating it with other data sources and machine learning capabilities.

“This is a path breaking step to put more intelligence in the network and enable us to enhance real-time experience of our consumers,” he said.

Savargaonkar said that Airtel’s collaboration on this project with Cisco has helped it to dynamically adjust our network during exponential increase in voice and data traffic.

In India, Cisco has also been working with Vodafone around SON technologies.

SON is now carrying out optimization based on customer experience and predictive analytics apart from the traditional approach of responding to network degradations.

SON self-healing applications have been enriched for taking proactive actions in near real time, using predictive machine learning and interworking of SON with NOC tools, PM analytics & customer experience analytics platforms.

Both companies are continuously working together to identify new use cases and enhancing SON capabilities of deployed platform.

“Airtel is building a completely automated network platform that self-monitors, adjusts, and modifies without manual intervention,” said Yvette Kanouff, senior vice president, general manager, Service Provider Business, Cisco.

“Working together, we designed an open, hyper-programmable architecture that consolidates Airtel’s multi-vendor, multi-domain network into a sleek, agile, unified system capable of scaling to meet the intense demands spanning in and outside its region,” Kanouff added.