 | Issue: | India 2009 |
| Article no.: | 9 | |
| Topic: | India and vendor R&D | |
| Author: | Kiran Pande | |
| Title: | President | |
| Organisation: | ECI India | |
| PDF size: | 255KB |
About author
Kiran Pande is the President of ECI India, responsible for India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Mr Pande began his career in the telecom industry as the Section Head Sales for the Telecom Projects Division at Larsen and Toubro. He later served as the Business Manager (West) for NCD Telecommunications before assuming the role of Sales Manager at ECI Telecom. Mr Pande earned an MBA from Mumbai University and is a graduate of Pune University in Mechanical Engineering.
Article abstract
India’s growth as a telecom market is impressive. Its burgeoning economy, its vast population and the ingenuity of Indian telecom providers and equipment producers has fostered an environment where top quality service survives profitably despite some of the world’s lowest ARPUs. Equipment and service vendors have learned much about providing flexible, scalable, cost-efficient products to meet the demands of the Indian market and are using what they have learned from this R&D to provide better service in the rest of the world.
Full Article
India emerges India is amongst the world’s most impressive emerging markets. Following significant economic reforms in the early 90s, India began a remarkable transformation into one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Today, with a GDP of US$1.089 trillion, India boasts the twelfth-largest economy in the world, and the country’s share of world trade has reached one per cent. Services, most notably telecommunications, account for nearly 40 per cent of the country’s GDP. The growing strength and importance of India’s economy is undeniable, but what will be the market elements that shape its future growth and help it gain the recognition it deserves in terms of global mind share? The answer lies in two letters: R and D. The Petri dish It is quite common for foreign companies to see India’s progress in the telecommunications industry as an opportunity to outsource their more tedious projects. However, telecom vendors working in India have uncovered a hidden opportunity; they are utilizing their experience with their Indian customers in the country’s explosive local market as a Petri dish for product development efforts. India’s telecommunications infrastructure continues to develop rapidly trying to meet local needs, and to overcome a wide variety of challenging regional characteristics, local customer requirements and conditions. This helps vendors understand the growing needs of the global market with regard to issues such as scalability, density and environmental ruggedness. The unparalleled traits of the Indian market, including world-leading customer growth rates, massive networks and challenging environmental conditions, make it the breeding ground for global innovation and, as such, an important classroom for vendor R&D efforts. The knowledge that can be gained in the Indian market is invaluable, and gives companies who recognise this potential a significant edge, improving their product offering for Indian customers and others around the world. Unparalleled growth With monthly subscriber additions reaching double-digit-million figures, India is the second-fastest growing wireless market in the world, putting significant demands on the operators to support the growing capacity while maintaining their existing infrastructure investments. To maximize the return on CAPEX while maintaining quality of service for their customers, they need to make sure their networks are as future proof as possible. This requires a special effort to ensure that all infrastructure equipment provided to Indian operators is scalable, so they can easily upgrade their equipment at their own pace if and when there is a need. This upgrading of their existing equipment, rather than having to implement forklift solutions at various growth stages, helps them to avoid the concern of rendering previous investments meaningless. With this in mind, some telecom vendors doing significant business in India have designed their products to address this demand, allowing increased scalability and the addition of new functionalities on existing platforms without the need to replace existing legacy equipment. For example, products developed with the India market in mind can expand their capacity fourfold simply by swapping the platform’s line cards. This allows for gradual capacity growth using the same platform even with very high growth rates, such as those experienced by India operators. Extensive networks With its sprawling coastline, India is the seventh-largest country in the world by geographical area. Due to the number of elements required on Indian networks to support their sheer size, telecom equipment needs to cater to much higher traffic aggregation requirements. As such, a special development effort was made to introduce a high capacity 240G switching matrix for multiple low rate traffic streams. This approach allows service providers in India to save on CAPEX by reducing the number of infrastructure elements in their networks. Network management systems (NMS) are also a challenge in India. Because of the country’s size, not to mention the enormous amount of land development taking place, one of the greatest obstacles for a successful NMS in India is the enormous number of network alarms created by fibre cuts. Typically, when a fibre is cut, thousands of circuits and services transported on the same fibre are affected, creating an avalanche of alarms; a lot of ground must be covered to fix the problem. For this purpose, alarm correlation capabilities – and other technical advancements – must be integrated into any NMS designed for India. This greatly improves fibre cut fault management, speeds repairs and lowers costs. When alarm correlation is activated, the system automatically performs root cause analysis, displaying a single root cause alarm such as ‘Fibre Cut’ or ‘Duct Failure’, instead of thousands of alarms for each and every circuit on the fibre that failed. The user’s job finding the source of the problem is then made much easier, leading to faster problem resolution, more efficient use of staff, and ultimately to OPEX savings. Harsh environment India’s climate is notable for its extreme temperatures and moisture-laden summer monsoon winds. This, coupled with its harsh environmental conditions and high levels of air pollution, calls for a series of environmental qualification procedures for telecom equipment, in addition to those specified in existing international standards put forth by institutions such as ETSI, among others. In response to these conditions and the resulting local and international standards, vendors have begun applying anti-sulphur coating to selected high runner cards deployed in India to protect them from chemicals in the country’s highly polluted air. In addition, the chip packaging for critical components has been upgraded to industrial-grade to sustain a wider range of temperature levels ranging from -5 C to 80 C degrees. The adjustments required by the challenging conditions in India can also be used to improve reliability elsewhere; the same changes, and the greater reliability, flexibility and scalability they bring will help increase a vendor’s success around the globe offering operators in other regions the same benefits of scale and adaptability dictated by the India market. Excellence in India India is without question one of the most compelling emerging telecom markets in the world. Thanks to its low-cost, high-quality networks and innovative marketing, the country is a model of efficiency in global telecom. Vendors working in India believe that their presence there and relationship with Indian companies will eventually benefit all of their customers globally. Though foreign companies will continue to utilize India’s vast and immensely talented workforce as an extension of their own, those who are willing to take notice will discover that India has so much more to offer as a key proving and development ground for their R&D efforts. India has truly become a breeding ground for global innovation.
