UPSC Articles
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