Bharti Airtel, Asia’s integrated telecom service provider, and Alcatel-Lucent have formed a joint venture to manage the former’s pan-India broadband and telephone services and help its transition to next-generation networks.

 

Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) officials said that the company would design, plan, deploy, optimize and manage Bharti Airtel’s broadband and telephone network across India. A new legal entity is being formed which will be operated by Alcatel-Lucent, according to the companies.

 

“This joint venture is another step towards Bharti Airtel’s (News - Alert) vision to continuously redefine and deliver the benchmarks of customer experience. We will leverage Alcatel-Lucent’s global expertise in IP transformation and network management while allowing us to focus on customer delivery and market growth,” said Manoj Kohli, chief executive officer and joint managing director at Bharti Airtel.

 

Kohli said that it will also help the company to accelerate performances as its migrate to next generation networks for the broadband and telephone customers, opening the door to advanced services and applications.

 

Bharti Airtel Limited, a group company of Bharti Enterprises, is one of Asia’s leading integrated telecom services provider with operations in India and Sri Lanka and an aggregate of over 96.6 million customers as of the end of March 2009, consisting of about 94 million mobile customers.

 

“We appreciate the opportunity that Bharti Airtel has given us to demonstrate our worldwide expertise in network transformation, managed network services and IP transformation,” said Ben Verwaayen (News - Alert), chief executive officer of Alcatel-Lucent.

 

Verwaayen said that the expansion of the relationship draws on the company’s strengths as a global services player, ready to partner with innovative customers in their business transformation plans. Alcatel-Lucent is a partner of service providers, enterprises and government agencies worldwide, providing solutions to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users.

 

Recently, T-Systems and Alcatel-Lucent announced they have inked a global framework agreement under which Alcatel-Lucent is providing T-Systems (News - Alert) and Deutsche Telekom with convergent communications solutions from its enterprise portfolio.