Bharti Airtel said its IoT offering includes its proprietary platform dubbed “Airtel IoT Hub”
Indian telecommunications operator Bharti Airtel announced that it has formed a strategic partnership with smart metering and digital solutions provider IntelliSmart with the aim of powering up to 20 million smart meters, the telco said in a release.
Airtel noted the agreement, which marks the largest deal of its kind in India, will enable the telco to significantly expand its presence in different sectors with its IoT solutions.
Airtel said its IoT offering includes its proprietary platform dubbed “Airtel IoT Hub”, which will help the local utility track and monitor these smart meters with advanced analytics while maintaining high reliability augmented with telco-grade security. Housed on Airtel’s own cloud network, the IoT hub will allow enterprise users to connect and manage billions of devices and applications in a highly secure way, Airtel added.
Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO of Airtel Business, said: “We have further strengthened our market leadership as the largest IoT enabler in the country. IoT is one of the fastest-growing business segments for Airtel Business and, with this deal, we are now strategically positioned to play a pivotal role in driving the Government of India’s vision of digitizing 250 million conventional meters to smart meters.”
“India’s smart metering program is one of the significant steps taken by the government to modernize the power distribution sector. Smart meters are critical building blocks for smart grids and a fundamental enabler of the digitalization efforts of the power system. As we set forward to implement one of India’s largest portfolios of smart meters, we are relying on some of the most potent partners in the sector for various solution elements to support the successful deployment of our Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) solutions,” said Anil Rawal, managing director and CEO of Intellismart Infrastructure.
“We are confident that the on-boarding of Airtel as a strategic partner will be a significant step towards our goal of creating strong associations to strengthen our infrastructure solution with a resilient and secure cloud-hosted cellular communication network,” Rawal added.
The Government of India has the goal of replacing 250 million conventional meters with smart meters in the next five years as part of its AMI initiative.
In June, Bharti Airtel announced that its B2B division Airtel Business had already connected over 20 million devices through its IoT solutions across India.
The company said that its Airtel IoT service provides enterprises across different industries such as automobile, energy, utilities, logistics, financial services and manufacturing with a secure and dedicated private network for the safe transmission of all customer data across connected devices.
Airtel said its portfolio includes solutions such as asset tracking, vehicle telematics, industrial asset monitoring and smart metering, among others. These IoT-based services are offered via different technologies such as 5G, 4G, NB-IoT, 2G and satellite.
