The Indian wireless network megadeals keep on coming. The latest, involving tech giant Ericsson, is a multi-billion dollar contract for 5G equipment which it will supply to Indian operator Bharti Airtel.
This comes after Ericsson won part of a US$3.6 billion contract last month for selling 5G equipment to India's Vodafone Idea. The deal – involving Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung – is for the supply of network equipment over a period of three years. It also involves 4G network upgrades.
Soon after this, Vodafone Idea also announced plans to strengthen its network security with Nokia NetGuard Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR).
The amount involved in the Bharti deal has not been revealed. Indeed, on Monday, when the news broke, it had not been formally acknowledged on the Ericsson website. Nevertheless, Reuters has suggested, not too surprisingly, that this deal and the contract with Vi are likely to boost Ericsson's revenue next year after the tech giant saw a big fall in contracts from India in the first half of the year.
Much of the deployment is likely to happen next year, according to a source quoted by Reuters, which points out that demand from the Indian 5G market started to skyrocket in 2023, when Airtel and Jio started to scale up 5G services.
While these two giants are advanced in their 5G rollouts, Vi, which came fairly late to the 5G party, is now looking like a promising potential customer for the big network equipment providers.
