Airtel partners with Qwilt to offer Content Delivery service across India

Airtel, one of India’s leading telecom service providers today announced a partnership with Qwilt to launch Airtel Cloud’s edge content delivery network. The partnership will help Airtel leverage Qwilt’s Open Edge Cloud solution to improve the quality of live streaming, video-on-demand (VoD) and all other media delivery to its over 400 million subscribers throughout India.

Qwilt’s solution is deeply embedded within Airtel’s network, and therefore closer to Airtel’s subscribers than any other commercial or private CDN. 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. This edge architecture reduces the cost of building network capacity and substantially improves delivery quality.

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.

Ajay Chitkara, Director and CEO, Airtel Business, said.

The partnership allows Airtel to scale up very rapidly as viewer demand increases. 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.

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 preforming edge delivery network.

Alon Maor, CEO, Qwilt, said.

Qwilt’s cloud-managed open platform, running on commodity compute and storage infrastructure, and deployed close to consumers, creates a massively distributed Edge Cloud that supports applications such as Open Caching, 4K Live Streaming, AR, VR, Self-Driving Cars and IoT. Qwilt’s unique Edge Cloud Platform and Open Caching software and cloud solutions help Internet Service Providers address the dramatic growth of streaming media on their networks and the need for low latency, high-scale infrastructure to support future applications.