Indian telecom lacks passion for innovation

BANGALORE, INDIA: On the first day of EmTech India 2011, many interesting thoughts came by.

Though India is at the centre of all happenings when it comes to telecommunication, it still lacks two aspects — they are competitiveness in running a company and passion for innovation, noted Vishwanath Poosala, head, Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent.

“Emerging markets will make up 50 per cent of overall market, by 2015. Earlier innovation for emerging markets was all about the bottom of the pyramid, i.e. by addressing low connectivity issues in rural area. Whereas, the top of the pyramid has often been ignored. However, today a lot is happening in the areas of mobile payments, high definition location-based services on mobile phones etc,” opined Poosala.

While talking on ‘Innovating for Emerging markets in MNCs’, he suggested a step-by-step strategy in order to encourage innovation in emerging markets.

Identify the areas, chip in a small amount and create a venture incubator, tap in the innovation, he added.

Poosala noted that today the world is witnessing a ‘reverse innovation’ scenario, wherein any innovation in an emerging market is not just confined to the particular market; on the contrary has an disruptive impact world over.

Need for wireless network localization

Moe Z. Win, Associate Professor at the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during his session on 'Location-Aware Wireless Networks' dwelt on the importance of wireless network localization.

In the last 10 years, the possibility of using wireless connections to deduce mobile devices’ locations has been a hot research topic in industry and academia.

“Location awareness is important for many applications such as rescue operations, asset localization, cargo tracking and monitoring etc in a GPS-denied environment. In the current scenario this is facing issues such as heterogeneous networks, interference from traditional networks, accuracy, reliability, scalability etc,” said Win.

MIT’s Wireless Communications and Network Sciences Group in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) is developing a theoretical framework that explains just how accurate a wireless location information can be, depending on network characteristics such as interference and available bandwidth.

“Everything that we do, we try to approach in three steps,” added Win. “One is to try to understand ultimate limits, the second thing is to design practical algorithms that approach these limits. The third aspect is experimental verification.”