Bharti Airtel and IIT Delhi to set up Telecom Centre of Excellence

Bharti Airtel and IIT Delhi to set up Telecom Centre of Excellence

Bharti Airtel Limited, India’s leading telecommunications services provider, and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi today announced that they will establish the Bharti-IIT Delhi Telecom Centre of Excellence. The Bharti-IIT Delhi Telecom Center of Excellence will be established at the Bharti School of Telecommunication Technology and Management, IIT Delhi. An Expression of Interest in this regard was signed between Bharti Airtel and IIT Delhi.

The Bharti-IIT Delhi Telecom Centre of Excellence is being set up as part of an initiative by the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India. The objective of the Centre is to promote innovation in the telecom sector and capacity building through knowledge towards achieving Telecom Vision 2010 of the Government. The Centre will also work towards providing support to the industry in planning future telecom growth in the country and reducing the rural urban digital divide. It will promote focused R&D in the area of telecom and also work development of India specific telecom applications.

On the occasion Prof. Surendra Prasad, Director, IIT Delhi said, “This is another major initiative by the Government of India to support growth of telecom sector in India. We are happy to partner Bharti Airtel in setting up this centre and promoting excellence in the area of telecommunications.”

Mr. Manoj Kohli, President, Bharti Airtel Ltd. added, “The India telecom sector is today playing a crucial role in the development and progress of the country. We are delighted to further strengthen our partnership with IIT-Delhi through this major initiative by the DoT to develop India as a world-class telecom hub.”

Bharti and IIT Delhi have already established the Bharti School of Telecommunication Technology & Management with a vision ‘To develop telecom leaders through excellence in education and research’. The school offers post-graduate programmes, i.e. M.Tech, MBA, MS (Research) and PhD in telecommunication and has a state-of-the-art Teaching and Research infrastructure.

About Bharti Airtel Limited:

Bharti Airtel Limited, a group company of Bharti Enterprises, is India’s leading integrated telecom services provider with an aggregate of 50 million customers. Bharti Airtel has been rated among the best performing companies in the world in the BusinessWeek IT 100 list 2007.

Bharti Airtel is structured into three strategic business units – Mobile services, Broadband & Telephone (B&T) services and Enterprise services. The mobile business provides mobile & fixed wireless services using GSM technology across 23 telecom circles. The B&T business provides broadband & telephone services in 94 cities. The Enterprise services provide end-to-end telecom solutions to corporate customers and national & international long distance services to carriers. All these services are provided under the Airtel brand. Airtel’s high-speed optic fibre network currently spans over 53,000 kms covering all the major cities in the country. The company has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems – i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Europe. For more information, visit www.bhartiairtel.in

About Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi

Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi is one of the seven Institutes of Technology created as centres of excellence for higher training, research and development in science, engineering and technology in India, the others being at Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Bombay, Guwahati and Roorkee. Established as College of Engineering in 1961, the Institute is an Institution of National Importance under the “Institutes of Technology (Amendment) Act, 1963″ and was renamed “Indian Institute of Technology Delhi”. In 1999, IIT Delhi and Bharti Enterprises established the Bharti School of Telecommunication Technology and Management within IIT Delhi.