Bharti Airtel inks ‘$500 million JV pact’ with Alcatel-Lucent

Bharti Airtel and Alcatel-Lucent Bharti Airtel, India's largest mobile phone operator in terms of subscriber base, has formed a joint venture with France-based Alcatel-Lucent, to manage its pan-India broadband and telephone services.

Alcatel-Lucent will hold 74 per cent in the joint venture, while Bharti will hold the rest 26% stake.  

Under the joint venture, Alcatel-Lucent will design, plan, deploy, optimize and manage Bharti Airtel's broadband and telephone network across India.  
In addition, Euronext and NYSE-listed firm will also support Bharti Airtel's transformation to next generation networks, offering advanced services like high-speed internet, triple play, media-rich VAS, MPLS, VPN for both retail and business customers.  

Bharti stated in a communiqué that under the contract, Alcatel-Lucent will form a new legal entity and hire 4000 professional employees, which will responsible for handling activities such as installation and fault repair, service continuity and transformation.  

The 5-year fixed-line and broadband network management deal is valued at $500 million (Rs 2500 crore).

Alcatel-Lucent is considered as most experienced global services organization in the industry, for providing solutions to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users.  The company has operations in more than 130 countries.