The ‘Need for Speed’ for high-speed Broadband

With the onslaught of everything fast, it is immensely important to understand how do telecom operators in India look at High speed Broadband? Experts answer if this can be seen as an opportunity or a challenge for the Indian Telecom Sector. Tilak Raj Dua, TAIPA, Manish Vyas, Tech Mahindra and Kundan Das, Parallel Wireless give their views on any prediction or possibility that we should expect in 2019 for High-Speed Broadband in India.

According to Tilak Raj Dua, Director General, TAIPA, with the multi-fold data growth, high definition content and futuristic technologies such as 5G use cases, IoT, M2M, AR, VR and blockchain etc. the country is poised to have high-speed broadband connection. The telecom sector looks at it as the opportunity that comes with a challenge. However, with proactive and extensive government support, we are optimistic that masses will soon unearth the potential of high-speed internet.

Manish Vyas, President, Communications, Media & Entertainment Business, and the CEO, Network Services, Tech Mahindra believes that today there is an industry-wide strong consumer demand for more and more data. The challenge for the industry is to find solutions that will meaningfully lower the cost-per-bit, and solutions that can add more capacity in the networks in a cost-effective manner. SDN (Software-Defined Networking) /NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and 5G hold the promise to do exactly this. Furthermore, the introduction of Orchestration solutions will enable Telcos to dynamically slice their network and deliver optimal networks for end-user needs which in many cases will be businesses from different industry verticals. To effectively monetize their networks in future, Telcos have to become more agile and will have to keep pace with the digital transformation of different industry verticals.

According to Kundan Das, Head – Business Development and Sales APJC, Parallel Wireless,  it’s always going to a challenge. If one looks at individual consumption, the user is consuming voice, and consuming data. Now voice is data. Even if the video is of low definition or high definition, it is critical that it needs to be served with the right approach, quality, and satisfaction of the customers— which requires high capacity. It is not just voice and it is not other applications largely. So that becomes a challenge that the data is going to grow but the revenue in itself isn’t going to grow in the same proportion. Hence, the per GB data is always coming down. So, the key challenge is that when an operator designs a network, what is the overall cost today it is taking to deliver 1 GB of data and how fast can it bring that particular cost down. That is the key focus of operators. Because the operator which is going to reduce that per GB data cost (which is a low cost per beat)  will be able to achieve high revenue per week. That is going to a factor which is going to decide the future.