Airtel Deploys India’s First Private 5G Network

Airtel announced successful trial of India’s first 5G Private Network at Bosch Automotive Electronics India Pvt Ltd (RBAI) facility in Bengaluru. Airtel’s on-premise 5G Captive Private Network was built over the trial 5G spectrum allocated by the Department of Telecom (DoT).

The company has implemented two Industrial grade use cases for quality improvement and operational efficiency at Bosch’s state of the art manufacturing facility, utilising the trial spectrum. In both the cases, 5G technology such as mobile broadband and ultra-reliable low latency communications drove automated operations ensuring faster scale up and reduced downtimes.

The private network set up on trial spectrum at the Bosch facility has the capability to manage thousands of connected devices along with delivering multi- GBPS throughput. The Private 5G network provides greater reliability, enhanced security and huge flexibility, freeing the operations from wire-dependency to enable Bosch in achieving the benefits of automated operations.

Airtel 5G Captive Private Network, Bosch Manufacturing Execution System was able to significantly reduce the time taken to assess the quality through Automatic Optical Inspection (AOI) of surface mounted devices. The process was made efficient by ensuring faster transfer of data over highly reliable and secure network to an AI/ML server for real-time decision making by Bosch Manufacturing Execution System (MES).

Airtel 5G also helped Bosch shop floor managers and operators identify and resolves issues in real time thus reducing the Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).

Ajay Chitkara, Director and CEO – Airtel Busines said, “Airtel is committed to India’s digital transformation and supporting the development of its enterprise as they seek to acquire global scale. We believe that Airtel has the world class infrastructure, partnerships and expertise to deliver Captive Private Network Solution in any part of the country and to enterprise of any size.”

Subhash P, Head of Technical Functions, Bosch Automotive Electronics Indi states: “The low latency and reliable connectivity provided by the Airtel Private 5G network at our facility which was experienced during the proof of concept is enabling us to enhance our efficiency and our productivity. Usage of 5G will significantly reduce IT wired infrastructure and enhance the operational effeciency.”