Airtel Partners With Qwilt to Provide Content Delivery Services Throughout India

New partnership enables India’s largest integrated telco to improve streaming quality to over 400 million subscribers across the country

Qwilt announced that Bharti Airtel Limited (Airtel), India’s leading provider of telecommunications services, has joined its global ecosystem of service providers to improve the quality of live streaming, video-on-demand (VoD) and all other media delivery to its over 400 million subscribers throughout India. The partnership sees Airtel launch its own content delivery service, Airtel Cloud’s Edge CDN, across India based on Qwilt’s technology and become the largest service provider to date to deploy Qwilt’s Open Edge Cloud solution.

Qwilt’s Open Edge Cloud solution for service providers includes Qwilt software, cloud services and open APIs, providing Quality-as-a-service content delivery and caching at the very edge of the carrier’s network. Qwilt’s solution is deeply embedded within Airtel’s network, and therefore closer to Airtel’s subscribers than any other commercial or private CDN. This edge architecture reduces the cost of building network capacity and substantially improves delivery quality.

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Ajay Chitkara, Director and CEO, Airtel Business, said: “Airtel is India’s leading provider of telecommunications services. As we get ready to launch 5G services we anticipate a significant increase in data consumption across major cities. Airtel Cloud’s Edge CDN, based on Qwilt’s technology, will substantially increase our ability to reliably deliver high-quality live and VoD streaming throughout India. We already have relationships with 16+ content providers across Indian states and we look forward to working with others looking to serve in this region so they can also enjoy the benefits of Airtel’s unique service offering across India.”

Qwilt’s Open Edge Cloud enables Airtel to establish a massively distributed layer of content caching resources that deliver streaming media and applications from the closest possible location to subscribers. Each low-cost edge server can be utilized by other virtual network function (VNF)-based services making it cost-effective enough to distribute throughout the service provider’s access network. The partnership allows Airtel to scale up very rapidly as viewer demand increases.

Alon Maor, CEO, Qwilt, said, “Airtel is a tremendously exciting addition to our global ecosystem of service providers, and we are delighted to power a unique content delivery service offering in India. Our edge architecture provides a new economic model for streaming delivery, in which Airtel Cloud’s Edge CDN plays a central role in the end-to-end value chain. This announcement underscores the momentum we are gathering as we realize our ambition to build the world’s highest performing edge delivery network.”

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