Communications for masses!

‘Making communications available to the masses’ has been the mantra, which every telecom service provider in India has been basking on and Reliance Communications since its arrival in the scene has taken this phrase to newer levels.

With a strong intent of making communications to everyone under the sun, this company has been bludgeoning the communication base of the country in an appreciable rate.

Sumit Chowdhury, CIO, Reliance Communications spoke to Prasad Ramasubramanian of CyberMedia News on the telecom infrastructure in the country and efforts that need to be taken to take the telecom scenario further.

How do you view the present scenario of telecom infrastructure in the country?

You have to understand that to reach the masses, the infrastructure has to be in place.

If there is a fiber optic which is just 100 feet away from my house and to bring it to my place would cost the company about a lakh of rupees. That is the problem that we are facing today.

With building construction going on in every part of the country, you can expect to have the cable cuts and we have dedicated to look into this matter of fiber cuts.

Now that is the problem, which the company faces during expansion. We have to manage and monitor it.

There is a lot of information that is being generated and it is important to give the right information at the right time and that’s the mantra that we are moving ahead with.

The Internet and the broadband will take a long time to penetrate the rest of the country. We want to provide communication services and make it cheaper for the masses and make it accessible to the masses.

Reliance Communications has taken the telecom sector to an altogether new level. Could you talk a bit on the areas that you cover and the reach that your company has?

Presently we are in about 10,000 towns and the plan is to take it to 23,000 more, and for doing that we have got 13-14,000 towers.

In the infrastructure front, the goal is to take it to 27,000 towers and from there to 54,000 towers. We also have the world’s largest IP-enabled optic fiber cable networks and have pioneered wireless affordability in the country.

The goal has always been to make the device as ubiquitous as possible.

Who are the customers you serve?

If you want numbers, then we have 45 million consumers in India and have over 1.4 million individual global customers. There are very few operators in the world who operate in that kind of network, manage the infrastructure with that kind of efficiency and manage the IP infrastructure.

We service about 10,000 Indian SMEs and we have to manage the infrastructure and we are getting to a point where we have the entire computing required to run the small and medium enterprises is available.

The computers, networks and bandwidth are one and we also have data card and wireless services which are for our high-end corporate customers.

What about the peripherals to run such networks?

Talking about peripherals, we have a fully integrated campus at the Knowledge City in Vashi. Now, managing that campus itself and the IT infrastructure that is required to manage it gives us the core competence to manage any campus anywhere.

The world seems to be going the Green way. What has been the initiatives taken by Reliance Communications on this front?

We have got a project going on it championed by Tina Ambani. We are doing a lot on that front, buying and changing our data centers, power consumption from our data centers have come down.