Nokia May Get Millions Dollar Contract from Bharti Airtel for 5G Equipment

Nokia, one of the big telecom equipment makers, is in talks with the country’s second largest telecom company Bharti Airtel for a contract worth millions of dollars. This contract is for providing 5G telecom equipment. Bharti Airtel is expanding its 5G network.

India is the second largest market for smartphones in the world. Bharti Airtel And telecom companies like Reliance Jio are spending millions of dollars to upgrade their networks. Earlier, the company had given a big contract for telecom equipment to Sweden’s Ericsson. These orders helped companies like Nokia and Ericsson mitigate the impact of the decline in demand from American customers last year.

Sources with knowledge of the matter said that Nokia’s deal with Bharti Airtel will be for the new AirScale mobile radios. These support upgrading the existing network to 5G. Nokia declined to comment on this matter. Bharti Airtel did not respond to a request for comment. South Korean electronics company Samsung is also trying to expand its network equipment business. However, in this segment it is behind Nokia and Ericsson. About two years ago, Samsung got its first contract for 5G from Bharti Airtel.

Bharti Airtel may soon buy the direct-to-home (DTH) business of Tata Play. Talks are going on between the two companies for this. However, Tata Play’s DTH service is running in loss. Buying this business will increase the company’s presence in the digital TV segment. The company is facing competition from DishTV and some other companies in this segment. Recently, the company had made a partial payment of Rs 8,465 crore of its dues in the spectrum auction held in 2016. However, Bharti Airtel has not disclosed how much outstanding amount it has to pay after this payment. Recently, the Supreme Court had rejected the request of telecom companies for re-calculation of the amount due to the government.

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