Indian telecom company Bharti Airtel and Meta are joining forces to aid India’s digital ecosystem growth.

As India prepares for more 5G rollouts throughout 2023, the two companies and STC are investing in extending the 2Africa subsea cable to Airtel’s landing station in Mumbai. 2Africa is the world’s longest subsea cable system, and the extension project is expected to provide faster internet connectivity to almost 3 billion people globally.

The partnership comes on the heels of another collaboration on the 2Africa cable – where WIOCC and Ciena are currently working on the fiber pair deployment with expectation to go live in stages over the next two years. The project looks to expand open access infrastructure throughout Africa and Europe.

Along with Airtel and Meta’s extension of the cable, the two companies will also explore open access in India through pushing 4G and 5G open radio access network (RAN) adoption. Both companies are members of Telecom Infra Project’s (TIP’s) Open RAN project group with a “shared goal of increasing ecosystem diversity,” according to the announcement.

“Subsea cables and open, disaggregated networks continue to play a huge role in the foundational infrastructure needed to support network capacity and fuel innovation,” stated Francisco Varela, VP of mobile partnerships at Meta.

Airtel signed an agreement to drive “efficiency of Open RAN and facilitate energy management and automation in radio networks,” and is currently conducting trials for 4G and 5G open RAN solutions throughout the state of Haryana. The company plans to deploy the solution commercially “over the next few quarters.”

“Airtel will share its learnings with wider ecosystem partners within the TIP community, including Meta, to help accelerate the deployment of Open RAN-based networks across the world,” the release noted.

“With our contributions to the 2Africa cable and Open RAN, we are investing in crucial and progressive connectivity infrastructure which is needed to support the increasing demand for high-speed data in India,” Bharti Airtel CEO of Global Business Vani Venkatesh stated in the announcement.