Google to invest up to $1 bn in Airtel

Google to invest up to $1 bn in Airtel

Part of: Prelims and GS-III -Economy

Context: Google will invest up to $1 billion in Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel, including $700 million for a 1.28% equity stake in the telecom operator.

Key takeaways 

• Google also has 7.73% stake in Jio Platforms since 2020.
• Bharti and Google will work together to build on Bharti’s extensive offerings via innovative affordability programmes.
• They would continue to explore building on their existing partnerships to potentially co-create India-specific, network domain use cases for 5G and other standards.

What is 5G?

• 5G is the fifth generation cellular technology that apart from increasing the downloading and uploading speeds (speed of 1 Gbps) over the mobile network, also reduces the latency i.e. the time taken by a network to respond. 
• It also increases energy efficiency and offers more stable network connections. 
• 5G is also designed to deliver signals more reliably than earlier cellular networks  
• 5G will have a wider area in the frequency spectrum (range of frequencies) that will ensure no network congestion. 
• In addition, it will also ensure connectivity to a full circle i.e. everything is connected to every other thing. 
• 5G will help facilitate the ecosystem for the Internet of Things (IoT) and to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our daily lives and  
• To get the benefits of 5G, users will have to buy new phones, while carriers will need to install new transmission equipment to offer the faster service.

News Source: TH