CHENNAI: Airtel Business has entered into a strategic partnership with Swift Navigation to deliver high-precision location services in India, aiming to set a new benchmark in accuracy and reliability. The collaboration brings together Swift’s Skylark cloud-based GNSS correction platform with Airtel’s extensive 4G and 5G network coverage, offering location accuracy down to the centimetre level—far superior to conventional GPS services.
The Skylark platform provides real-time corrections by modelling atmospheric errors across multiple stations, ensuring wider coverage, consistency and device compatibility. This technology supports applications in autonomous mobility, precision agriculture, fleet telematics, utilities, mapping and emergency services, where accuracy and reliability are critical.
Airtel’s role strengthens the offering by delivering low-latency correction streams through its telecom infrastructure, bundling services with IoT solutions, and leveraging its enterprise reach to scale adoption. The initial rollout, starting with key markets like the NCR, is designed to provide rapid coverage in high-demand regions.
The partnership addresses long-standing challenges in India such as signal reliability in dense urban areas and limited availability of cost-effective correction networks. By integrating Swift’s technology with Airtel’s connectivity and enterprise solutions, businesses will benefit from lower total costs of ownership, faster onboarding, and easier integration with a wide range of devices and chipsets.
Analysts believe this partnership positions Airtel to gain an edge in emerging sectors that require centimetre-level positioning, including advanced driver assistance systems, automated tolling, robotics and logistics. However, adoption may depend on factors such as device compatibility, pricing, and regulatory approvals, particularly for safety-critical applications.
"Overall, the Airtel–Swift Navigation alliance is seen as a decisive step in transforming India’s location services market, with the potential to deliver unmatched accuracy and open new opportunities across industries," says an industry advisor with a foreign consultancy firm, seeking not to be identified due to his company's policy.
The Global Positioning System (GPS), operated by the United States government, is the most widely used satellite navigation system worldwide. Standard GPS receivers typically provide accuracy within a range of about 5 to 10 meters under open-sky conditions. This level of precision is sufficient for general navigation, mapping, and consumer applications such as smartphone location tracking or vehicle routing.
However, GPS signals are subject to several sources of error, including atmospheric delays, satellite clock and orbital inaccuracies, and signal reflections from buildings or terrain (multipath effects). These factors prevent GPS from offering the centimetre-level accuracy required for advanced applications like autonomous driving, precision agriculture, or high-precision surveying.
To achieve centimetre accuracy, GPS data needs correction from external sources. Systems such as Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) and Precise Point Positioning (PPP) use correction signals from reference stations or cloud-based networks to model and eliminate most of the errors in satellite data. Without these corrections, standard GPS remains too coarse for mission-critical tasks, where even a meter-level deviation could compromise safety, efficiency, or operational reliability.
"While standard GPS provides meter-level accuracy, Swift Navigation’s Skylark platform enhances positioning to the centimetre level by delivering real-time correction data via a cloud-based network," said the industry advisor.
He added that Skylark continuously models atmospheric disturbances, satellite clock errors, and multipath effects using data from multiple reference stations, which significantly reduces the inaccuracies inherent in traditional GPS.
By combining these corrections with Airtel’s low-latency 4G/5G connectivity, Skylark ensures highly precise and reliable location information across urban, rural, and challenging environments. This makes it suitable for applications where standard GPS falls short, such as autonomous vehicles, precision agriculture, fleet management, and industrial automation, offering both consistency and scalability that meter-level GPS cannot achieve.