BANGALORE, INDIA: Indian telecom service provider Tata Communications was named APAC Service Provider of the Year 2010 by Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) in December 2010.

Presenjith Dey, product manager, Ethernet, Global VPN Services, Tata Communications, talks to CIOL about the company's plans for Ethernet services and what makes them different from others in this space. Excerpts:

CIOL: Tata Communications is one of the first Indian telecom service providers to venture into the Ethernet space. What made you do so?

Presenjith Dey: Tata Communications started off with this idea in 2005, when there wasn't much momentum for Ethernet within India. Customers as well as large corporate houses were not ready to invest in order to upgrade their traditional network, because of the huge cost attached to it.

Also Read: Ethernet services business to grow in India

However, back in 2005, we could see that this technology would become more adoptive because of the limitations of traditional network. A traditional DSL network lacks scalability, and so customers were kind of stuck owing to the lack of flexible bandwidth upgrading options.

Moreover, when a customer wants to scale their bandwidth capacity, they were forced to accept whatever a service provider sells and not that what they actually wanted.

So, we felt the need to start a business in telecom for Ethernet services, which is more flexible, adoptable and more of data centric.

We launched Ethernet services first in the US, and then expanded it to various locations such as Europe, Asia including Singapore, Japan, and India. Today we have more than 400 points-of-presence (PoP), including 120+ PoPs in India.

We rolled it out as a small business and on a year-on-year basis have gained momentum. It has grown to be an important business under our umbrella of services, when it comes to both enterprises and carriers.

CIOL: What is the kind of demand that you see for Ethernet services, especially from India?

Presenjith: There is a substantial demand from the customer side today. We expect a 45 per cent growth on year-on-year basis for Ethernet services this year.

Trends such as telepresence, online trading, is driving the need for Ethernet services because traditional networks will not be able to support the kind of traffic that is going into mobile backhaul.

It takes time to adopt and gear for an advanced platform and India is going through that phase. However, we see a huge demand and are planning to investing in a new Next Generation Ethernet (NGE) as well.

CIOL: What is NGE and how much have you invested in it?

Presenjith: When we started with Ether five years back, we never speculated that it is going to grow this big. Two years back, we found that this technology calls for further enhancements in terms of scalability, bandwidth, services options, VLANs, security, SLAs etc.

Thus we came out with NGE, and we are the first one to roll it out globally.

Analysts term our offering as 'threatening' and we are among the top five Ethernet service providers in the world. Now that we have cleared the issues with DoT and TRAI, we will be rolling it out in India during the next couple of months.

Mumbai and Delhi will be our core networks for NGE, which are already rolled out. The other nine regional PoPs will be soon rolled out. We have invested over $5 billion last year.