Top 10 transmission trends for 2009: Tejas

BANGALORE, INDIA: Here are the top 10 transmission trends for 2009, as per Siva Ramamoorthy, Group Director, Marketing, Tejas Networks.

Cellular Services Market



1. Growth of 3G services: World-wide, 3G has been deployed in several networks over the last seven years. However due to the spectrum allocation, 3G is yet to take off in India. We expect India to be a big market for 3G in the next few years. The rapidly increasing demand for data services would drive 3G deployments, particularly in metro areas. The spectral efficiency of 3G networks is a further incentive for Operators. In addition, the lack of legacy also enables Indian service providers to jump-start to later releases of 3G (3G Release 5, and HSPA). The initial deployments of HSPA would provide around 7Mbps per Base-Station, and move on towards 44Mbps per base station.

2. Evolution toward LTE: While 3G is a new technology in India, we do see Service Providers in other markets getting ready for deployment of LTE (long-term evolution). LTE promises to provide 50MBps of bandwidth per subscriber. While LTE deployments are still a few years away, transmission networks being deployed today are being planned with an ‘Evolution-towards-LTE’ strategy.

WIMAX Services

3. Growth of WIMAX Broadband services: WIMAX is a wireless technology that provides high-speed broadband. Majority of the copper infrastructure in India is owned by Public Sector Telecom Operators, and deploying copper to the houses is an expensive exercise for other operators. Hence, fixed-WIMAX is seen as an exciting alternative to providing DSL-based broadband (over the copper telephone line), particularly by private Service Providers. WIMAX has also been touted as a technology that would take Telecommunications connectivity to rural India. Sparse distribution and significantly lower ARPUs in rural areas make deployment of a copper-based infrastructure unprofitable. WIMAX provides the range (5-10 km) and the bandwidth (up to 75Mbps per base station) to profitably provide connectivity to rural India.

Home-market

4. Broadband market: While broadband in India started off as 256kbps service, 2Mbps services have started seeing uptake in several areas. This increase in bandwidth would not only drive network expansion, but would also force operators to look for solutions that enable operators to optimally use bandwidth across all its users.

5. IP-TV: India is witnessing its’ first few IP-TV deployments. IP-TV increases the range of services that can be offered along with the conventional video channels. This also enables Telecom operators to enter the Video-distribution market which has traditionally been served by cable operators.

6. VoIP: VoIP Services are being provided to reduce call-charges both for ISD and local calls. The VoIP Services complete the evolution of serviceproviders from TDM-services toward data services.

Enterprise market



7. Enterprises move away from point-to-point low-bandwidth TDM leased lines towards multipoint high-bandwidth IP/Ethernet services: Enterprise/corporate customers, who have traditionally demanded E1 and DS3 leased lines, are actively evaluating new Ethernet services to efficiently inter-connect offices. As companies distribute their offices across several locations, multipoint connectivity becomes an important feature for Enterprise services. Ethernet Services, as being defined by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), are proving to be popular among enterprises due to the fact that they lower costs of scale and operational costs.

Converged network for lowering capital expenditure

8. Since bandwidth per-subscriber is going up, it is important to lower capital expenditure significantly: Service providers are actively looking toward bandwidth pooling to share bandwidth between users. Thus, they are looking to deploy a converged network that provides cellular backhaul just as effectively as enterprise services.

9. Move toward a layered network that can serve requirements from leased lines to high-end IP services: The range of services provided by service providers has expanded to cover leased Fiber to a fully-managed service for enterprises. This implies that a service provider can no more depend on a single technology in the network. Thus, service providers deploy a mix of CWDM/DWDM, SDH/SONET, Ethernet, IP/MPLS and other technologies in accordance to the services being provided.

Emergence of Carrier-Ethernet



10. Emergence of Carrier-Ethernet: On the optical network infrastructure front, pure-packet technologies such as Carrier Ethernet hold the promise of lower price/bandwidth ratio. Carrier Ethernet provides bandwidth efficiency by employing statistical multiplexing and is perfectly congruent to the All-IP transmission that 3G and WIMAX demand. The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.) has been working on the standards that enable Carrier Ethernet. This would pave the way for Network Operators to deploy Carrier Ethernet systems that scale to several 10s of Gbps, and would lower network infrastructure costs.

Tejas's strategy to address emerging needs

Tejas Networks provides networking solution to service providers who provide wireless services, residential triple-play (Internet, video, and voice) and enterprise connectivity (business services).

Tejas's products address the needs of service providers by providing Optical Networking platforms that lower network costs while enabling Service Providers to provide more bandwidth-intensive and stringent-SLA-based services (like high-speed broadband and VoIP).

Tejas’ Ethernet-switched NG-SDH solution enables service providers to provide new data services (such as mobile video, and broadband) over existing network and enables Operators to maximally use their existing resources. Tejas’ compact transmission platforms allow Operators to provide several services from a significantly smaller platform, thus enabling Operators to save on real-estate, a significant cost in metro areas.

Tejas is also investing in Carrier-Ethernet based pure-packet platforms that will allow operators providing data services only to scale their metro networks from a few 100Mbps to several 10s of Gbps in a cost-effective manner.