Voice&Data Talkies #7: Ryan Perera, Country Head, Ciena India

Ciena is one of the largest networking systems, services and software companies across the world. With their reach and experience, the company has built partnerships across the Indian telecom sector, working with all the TSPs. Ciena has established itself as an important participant in India's drive to roll out 5G this year.

Leading the India chapter of the networking company is Ryan Perera. A Harvard Business School and Wharton alumnus, he recently became the Vice President of Asia Content & Subsea Networks, India & the Subcontinent.

In the seventh edition of Voice&Data Talkies, Perera expanded on Ciena's participation in 5G trials and the subsequent rollout, and technology and innovations that make it possible.

Can you please elaborate on Ciena's participation in the ongoing 5G trials in India?

As the leading ‘connectivity’ vendor for Indian telecom providers, Ciena is actively working with all Telcos in preparing their networks for 5G. This includes core backbone network revamps and upgrading their ‘mobile back-haul’ networks.

In addition to the sheer capacity upgrades, we are also automating the networks for faster service provisioning, enabling wide-scale traffic engineering (aka Transport Slicing) and improving operational automation.

The Government has set a deadline of 15th August 2022, for the 5G rollout in India. Do you think it is achievable?

The Indian Telcos are focusing on high density urban pockets to start their 5G journey. As per the latest information from the Indian Government, the 5G auctions may not happen until July 22. Telcos have said that they will take six months to start offering 5G services from when the spectrum is allotted.

Notwithstanding, all telcos are currently actively preparing and trialing India specific 5G use cases in various parts of the country.

What do you think are top use cases for 5G?

First remains an enhanced broadband; cost efficient, ubiquitous eMBB still remains the primary use case, which will enable a myriad of applications in AR/VR, Gaming, healthcare, surveillance and Industrial automation. However, how effectively the Telcos will monetize the carriage for these applications remains to be seen.

Secondly, the Fixed Wireless Access (FWA); given India’s fixed broadband penetration is still less than 10%, mmWave based 5G FWA do offer great potential to complement in this space. Sufficient spectrum allocation, pricing, the need for large numbers of antennas in urban area are some of the challenges that still need to be sorted out.

Lastly, private 5G for enterprises is gaining a lot of traction as well.

As 5G has been talked about, the enterprise is going to be a key focus of 5G. What are some of the main use cases for 5G in the enterprise?

5G will transform several industries such as video monitoring and detection for advanced security, telehealth, mobile immersive AR/VR-based experiences, fixed wireless access, cloud-connected robotics for Industry 4.0, connected vehicles, and several others.

As business mobility and data demand grows, enterprises need reliable, high-capacity, low-latency wireless networks. Existing networks were not designed to meet new and evolving demands. Dedicated 5G-powered private wireless networks allow enterprises to better address new business challenges allowing enterprises to benefit from ultra-low-latency and high-speed connectivity for enhanced operational efficiency and productivity.

Flexible, agile wireless connectivity enables an enterprise to ensure a faster go-to-market. However, a significant benefit of a private 5G network is that it can be tailored to meet the specific requirements of an industry and company, which creates new business opportunities alongside improved operations.

What are the critical success factors for 5G rollout in India?

There are three top critical success factors for 5G rollout in India. The first one is a sufficient contiguous spectrum. Along with this, an affordable spectrum pricing also plays an important role. Thirdly, appropriate Right of Way (RoW) improvements for faster fiberisation of base stations.

What are some of the challenges associated with a 5G rollout?

Traditional mobile networks are hardware-centric and built in a closed and proprietary manner meaning a single vendor would the provide network equipment. 5G will be more open in the wireless and wireline domains, meaning more vendors will participate in the end-to-end network. This creates integration and cross-vendor testing challenges that will require greater internal and/or external skills and resources. This is what has been successfully implemented in other parts of the greater IT and networking industry.

Programmable, flexible, scalable, and agile networks are the need of the hour to address the impending wave of IoT and new use-cases and applications associated with 5G. New technology approaches like virtualization and software-defined networks are required to build an open and automated 5G future.

Data-driven automation and software-powered networks are required to address the IoT and scaling challenges of ubiquitous 5G service availability and performance by being able to scale quickly and easily for simplified network management.

What are some of the technological innovations Ciena has done in the field of 5G?

Ciena is at the forefront of the development of the 5G ecosystem for transport. Our products and solutions form the foundation of several 4G mobile backhaul networks as well as initial 5G deployments across the globe.

Ciena’s xHaul Routers enable service providers to keep their CAPEX under control as they deploy 5G New Radio (NR) in a multi-architecture scenario. This allows service providers to leverage telco cloud new edge applications as they evolve through different levels of centralization, virtualization, and openness.

Our experience enables us to help service providers in effectively monetizing service provider networks and unlock new revenue streams. For instance, we have recently collaborated with Samsung Electronics to deliver 5G network solutions to the market.

Samsung is coupling Ciena’s xHaul solutions, next-gen MCP domain controller and Services with its own 4G/5G Core and RAN equipment, including virtualized RAN (vRAN) solutions, baseband units, radios and services, to support the next generation of high-bandwidth applications and services driven by expanding 5G networks.

Together, we will offer hardware and software solutions to service providers, helping them better address the increasing volume of 5G data traffic.