Huawei’s CloudAIR Helps Bharti Airtel Deliver a Superior Economic 4G Experience

In a global first, Bharti Airtel has successfully deployed three radio technologies (GSM, UMTS, LTE) on the 900MHz band within an 8.8MHz spectral bandwidth by using Huawei’s CloudAIR solution to deliver a superior 4G experience to its customers. Bharti Airtel is India’s largest mobile operator.

CloudAIR offers spectrum cloudification to allow different radio access technologies to share spectrum resources dynamically instead of using traditional spectrum sharing solutions. This works via an on-demand spectrum allocation method replacing static allocation, which enables Bharti Airtel’s 900MHz spectrum to serve GSM, UMTS and LTE simultaneously.

“CloudAIR gives us the ability to deploy LTE within the same 900MHz frequency alongside GSM and UMTS,” said Mr. Abhay Savargaonkar, CTO of Bharti Airtel. “This improves our LTE coverage significantly, which means our customers enjoy superior data experience and HD voice quality even in indoor locations.”

CloudAIR is an innovative radio network solution announced by Huawei in November 2016. Compared with traditional static allocation schemes, CloudAIR allocates fundamental and precious air interface resources which includes spectrum, power and channel, in a dynamic scheme according to traffic demand or mobile user location. This helps mobile operators significantly improve their network spectral efficiency, capacity and user experience.

“In past years, we cooperated closely with global partners to innovate ways to maximize the value of their precious spectrum and offer better mobile broadband service,” said Dr. Margaret Hu, President of Huawei’s Global Wireless Network Marketing. “We are happy to see that our innovative CloudAIR solution delivers significant performance gain and business value for commercial networks.”

Huawei’s CloudAIR solution had been deployed in more than 30 commercial networks by year-end 2017.