NEW DELHI: India’s market leader Bharti Airtel and and Korea’s SK Telecom Tuesday entered into an strategic alliance that would allow Airtel to leverage SK Telecom’s expertise to build the advanced telecom network and together work in developing fish-generation ( 5G ) technology, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Internet of Things (IoT).The partnership will work across several areas including developing bespoke software to dramatically improve network experience, leveraging advanced digital tools including machine learning, big data and building customized tools to improve network planning based on every customer’s device experience, the Gurgaon-based company in a statement said.The two companies will also collaborate on an on-going basis to evolve standards for 5G, NFV, SDN and IoT, and jointly work towards building an enabling ecosystem for the introduction of these technologies in the Indian context,” Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said.The partnership, according to him, will bring a dramatically improved experience to Airtel customers in India by leveraging the expertise of a company that has built one of the best mobile broadband networks in the world.Vendors such as Huawei, ZTE, Nokia and Ericsson are betting high on new technology and initiating field trials together with some of the leading mobile service carriers worldwide such as AT&T, China Mobile, SoftBank, China Unicom and Vodafone.Mittal recently said that East Asian nations — China, Japan and Korea would lead fifth-generation or 5G technology rollouts worldwide and India, according to him was closely eyeing region’s technological advancements.With SK Telecom’s clear and undisputed leadership in technology, this is one partnership that will decisively change the game in India and put the country at par with the most advanced broadband nations in the world,” Mittal added.“SK Telecom will work closely with Bharti to achieve new network innovations so as to deliver a greater value to Bharti’s customers,” Park Jung-ho, the President and CEO of SK Telecom said.The move makes perfect sense. Telecom service providers do need to acquire expertise in the network equipment segment, to improve their margins and also boost quality of service. But we also need a technology policy to better coagulate funds for R&D, so as to design and make in India telecom hardware instead of simply importing them. In the emerging digital economy, telecom network equipment would be a source of competitive advantage, and we need vision and proactive policy to step-up resource allocation in the technology-intensive segment.