In recent years, India’s main operators have been too preoccupied with the challenges of their own huge market, and with surviving the pandemic, to be highly active in other markets. Vodafone Idea, of course, is part of the global Vodafone group (for now at least) but is run in an arm’s-length way by its UK-based majority parent. Bharti Airtel has operations in Africa, having acquired businesses in 15 countries from Zain in 2010, but it has sold some of these to Orange. But there are more ways than one to assert scale and influence beyond one’s borders, and Reliance Jio and Airtel are both active in international initiatives, many connected to the emergence of new network architectures, such as O-RAN…