Airtel forays into Rs 7000 crore CDN service market

Bharti Airtel has plundered into the Rs 7000 crore content delivery service market and has appointed 15-16 over-the-top content providers along with companies working in the ed-tech and ecommerce markets. The launch comes ahead of its commercial 5G service launch, which will increase the video consumption, which in turn will drive the need for CDN services for video and gaming service providers.

The telco has partnered with Qwilt to launch its own content delivery service, Airtel Cloud’s Edge CDN, across India based on the former’s software technology. The launch will significantly improve quality of live streaming, video-on-demand (VoD) and all other media delivery to its over 400 million subscribers throughout India.

“Our strengths are data centers. We have 120 edge data centers…with data center connectivity and mobility as a service, it was natural for us to offer CDN as a service..with the proliferation of gaming and video, the demand for CDN is growing significantly. People need low latency, which is why we decided to bring CDN leveraging our cloud and data centers," Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, CEO-Enterprise Business said.

Pradipt Kapoor, Chief Information Officer of Airtel said that growing demand for data and bandwidth intent use cases such as AR/VR, gaming and video streaming are driving the telco’s CDN strategy.

Under the partnership with Qwilt, Airtel will be able to work with customers which are based outside of India but want to deliver their content using the telco’s network. Similarly, Airtel’s Indian customers will be able to deliver and serve their customers outside of the country.