Bharti Airtel taps ECI for mobile backhaul

Optical transport systems vendor ECI Telecom says it has won a contract to supply its Neptune family for Bharti Airtel. The India-based global mobile operator will use the systems within its evolved packet transport (EPT) network to improve its mobile backhaul capabilities across India.

ECI says the mobile backhaul network upgrade will enable Bharti Airtel to efficiently provide services as it upgrades its wireless network from 2G to 3G and 4G, with LTE-A on the further horizon. The Neptune platforms will supply end-to-end metro-core and aggregation capabilities to support delivery of Layer 1 to Layer 3 services, according to the company.

The Neptune systems offer converged IP, elastic MPLS (IP and TP), Ethernet (MEF CE2.0 certified), OTN, and WDM features. It also will "evolve" to support network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN), ECI adds (see "ECI Telecom unveils SmartLight SDN framework").

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