Airtel partners with IntelliSmart to power up to 20 million smart meters

Bharti Airtel has joined forces with IntelliSmart Infrastructure Private Limited, India’s leading smart metering and digital solutions provider, to power up to 20 million smart meters across the country.

With this partnership, Airtel has forayed into high-end applications such as Advance metering infrastructure and meter data management systems along with Cloud and Analytics, the telco said on Thursday.

Commenting on this development, Ganesh Lakshminarayanan , CEO, Airtel Business (India), said, "We have further strengthened our market leadership as the largest IoT enabler in the country. IoT is one of the fastest-growing business segments for Airtel Business and, with this deal, we are now strategically positioned to play a pivotal role in driving the Govt. of India’s vision of digitising 250 million conventional meters to smart meters. As we connect the devices across the country on our platform, we will exponentially grow our current IoT market share of 55.4% (as on Q1 FY23-24)."

This deal will significantly contribute towards Airtel's fast-growing IoT deployment across sectors. Airtel's proprietary platform the "Airtel IoT Hub" will help the utility track and monitor these smart meters with advanced analytics while maintaining extremely high reliability augmented with telco-grade security.

The IoT Hub, hosted on Airtel's robust cloud network, will provide enterprise users with the capability to connect and manage billions of devices and applications securely and seamlessly.

The Government of India is taking several steps to modernise the power distribution sector in the country. Airtel IoT aims to play a pivotal role in enabling the government's vision of replacing 250 million conventional meters with Smart Meters in the next five years as part of the AMI initiative.

"As we set forward to implement one of India's largest portfolios of smart meters, we are relying on some of the most able and potent partners in the sector for various solution elements to support the successful deployment of our Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) solutions. We are confident that the on-boarding of Airtel as a strategic partner will be a significant step towards our goal of creating strong associations to strengthen our infrastructure solution with a resilient and secure cloud-hosted cellular communication network," said Anil Rawal - MD & CEO, Intellismart Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd.