Making Indian telcos 3G ready

NEW DELHI, INDIA: While India waits for 3G to change its telecom landscape, telcos are ironing their strategies to outbid each other in spectrum auctioning and chalking out plans with vendors to roll out 3G services in the country. But deploying 3G is part of an evolutionary process, and is primarily driven by demand – be it for more voice services or data-rich offers. The existing wireless infrastructure in India has been designed to support only 2G technologies, both GSM and CDMA, for low capacity, TDM (voice centric) based services.

But the scenario needs to change with the advent of 3G. In the 3G era, networks need to be able to support both TDM-based 2G services and 3G-based ethernet services. With 3G, the service providers will be able to address the issue of urban plateau, spectrum availability for 2G and mobile broadband penetration that will further boost adoption of value added services.

Service providers will also see lower ARPUs not just from voice but more importantly from non-voice services. Another issue that makes 3G viable in current times is the lowering prices of 3G phones.

In the above background that makes 3G so lucrative, the service providers need to consider the following five commandments to being 3G ready:

1.     Choosing the right infrastructure platform: 

In the transmission section of the network, the 3G upgrade cost will depend on the solution chosen for 2G backhauling. The optimal investment of an operator is to  choose infrastructure platforms that support both 2G and 3G requirements, better known in the industry as 'converged packet-optics'. It can deliver significant reduction in an operator's 3G transmission spends.

Managing CAPEX and OPEX :

2.     While deploying 3G networks, operators will need to carefully manage both their OPEX and CAPEX spending. From a CAPEX perspective, networks need to be flexible and scalable, leveraging existing 2G infrastructure as much as possible but making provision to add necessary investments when customer demand justifies it.

3.      From an OPEX perspective, many operators are also looking at vendors to provide them with a unified management system that supports both the 2G and 3G networks, various network design and planning tools that help operators optimize their network rollout and asses future build requirements.

4.     Capacity planning :

One of the main challenges any network operator faces is predicting customer demand and preparing the network to support it ahead of time. Operators should plan for initial, ideal and worse case scenario when it comes to their network capacity.

5.     Scalability is the key :

A key priority for any operator is choosing the optimal 3G migration strategy, partnering with the right infrastructure vendor that will not only provide quality product portfolio, but one that will serve as a long term partner for growth. This includes providing operators with products solutions that are scalable and flexible, and which will allow them to fully leveraging their existing infrastructure investment.

Using converged and scalable infrastructure, operators can improve their ROI on network infrastructure, an important factor to consider when launching 3G networks in a low ARPU market such as India.

India will witness a shift where majority mobile subscribers will become 3G-enabled in a couple of years. This evolution will usher a golden era for all where service providers and vendors will see not just economies of scale but will also bridge the urban-rural digital divide and enhance socio-economic development.



Kiran Pande is the President of ECI Telecom India, an Israel based leading networking infrastructure equipment vendor delivering innovative communications platforms to carriers and service providers world over. He is an industry veteran with two decades long experience in the Indian telecom sector.