From Subsea Cables to 5G Plus, Airtel Business Discusses What’s New

JSA TV Interview with Vani Venkatesh, CEO, Global Business of Airtel Business

Capacity Europe, the continent’s largest telecoms networking conference and awards ceremony, took place last week, bringing together network operators, data centers, cloud providers, internet exchanges, content providers and satellite communities. Vani Venkatesh, CEO of Global Business of Airtel Business, sat down with JSA Executive Vice President and Managing Director Barb Mitchell during a JSA TV livestream to discuss the latest Airtel Business news, their recent shortlist nomination for the Global Carrier Awards and extending the world’s longest subsea cable system to India. View the whole video here and read on to catch the highlights.

Collaborating With Industry Peers

Vani shared that this is the first time she has attended Capacity Europe. “Being my first time, it’s super inspiring having people under one roof and also to learn from each other on the kind of innovations and initiatives they are taking.” The big topics of this year’s leadership panel were automation, digitization, innovation and collaboration.

Industry Recognition

Capacity Media is also recognizing Nxtra by Airtel for its sustainability efforts. As a result, the company was shortlisted for the prestigious Global Carrier Awards for Best Environmental, Social, Governmental (ESG) Initiative.

“We have been very heavily investing in sustainability. We are trying to get our data centers completely net positive by 2031 and in fact, some of our newer data centers, like the ones in Chennai, are already almost at 90 percent net positive. Sustainability is the core of our DNA, and that’s something we are looking forward to.”

Airtel Business was also shortlisted for Best Security Innovation for its iSOC based managed security services.

“We’ve implemented a next-gen iSOC to protect against cybersecurity crimes, so again that’s one other piece we are looking forward to.

Enabling Connectivity

Connecting the world is something that Airtel excels at. With almost half a billion customers across 17 countries, Airtel Business connects about 90% of the world’s population to SMS and connectivity through Airtel or partnering networks. Airtel has also invested in subsea cables. The business participates in 33 subsea cables and owns 7 of them. With 350,000 KM fiber routes and 120 edge data centers and 12 hyperscale data centers located in India, Airtel is happy to provide connectivity to its customers.

Looking Ahead

All of the investments Airtel is making are future-focused. Venkatesh said that the company’s investment in subsea cables is a major benefit to its customers “ because we can bring excellent quality connectivity for our hyperscalers and all of our enterprise customers. We also manage about 2,000 plus enterprises in India and about a million small and medium enterprises in India, enabling a lot of connectivity and digitization across the B2B space.”

Airtel plans to repeat this model in Africa to set the foundation for a strong connectivity ecosystem. Airtel recently launched its 5G Plus product.