The second of our operator-focused panels occurred at India Telco Summit, Dec. 16th, 2011 in Mumbai, India. (The first, on Capacity Planning, occurred at NANOG52 in Denver, Colorado, in June 2011, details can be found here.

India Telco Summit represents a unique confluence of leaders, designers, and regulators who are involved in the research, design, development, deployment, regulation, and application of communication and networking technologies. The theme of India Telco 2011 continues to be telecommunication systems and technologies for realizing broadband connectivity that makes business sense.

India Telco Summit Panel

India represents a unique market for the industry, with a potential customer-base of 1.2 Billion, a current mobile subscriber base north of 850M, and over 100M broadband subscribers, it possesses some unique characteristics (large rural spread, diverse languages and cultures, widely varying infrastructure readiness, and diversity of skilled personnel), while also sharing a number of characteristics found in all developing markets (issues of infrastructure, power, & transportation, low ARPUs, evolving regulatory structure, fragmented markets).

As such, it is a fertile breeding ground for new ideas applicable to many developing markets all across the world.

Our carrier-focused panel at this event was titled “Assessing Carrier Network Health; Key to Optimizing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)”, and had assembled some distinguished players from the telco ecosystem. In particular, our panelists included:

• Pranesh Babu, CTO, SIFY — one of India’s premier data center players and ISPs.
• Dr. Upendra Manyam, CTO, Commtel Networks — a unique company serving companies in the infrastructure (oil, gas, electricity, transportation) space, thus a de facto designer, operator, and builder of mission-critical networks
• Ajay Ranjan Mishra, Global Head of Industry Environment, Global CTO Office, Nokia-Siemens Networks, a global giant with $ 55B+ in revenue
• Madhawesh Kulkarni, Vice-President, Engineering & Offer Mgt., Carrier Services Solutions, Aricent- one of the largest global telecom integrators and services providers, with over $750M in revenue
• Shamim Akhtar, Senior Director, Network Architecture & Technology, Comcast – the nearly $40B cable giant, the largest cable company in USA

The focus of this panel was on advances in techniques for network measurement, and power-efficient network and equipment design. Both of these issues are germane to how operator’s build, manage, and run their networks in emerging markets.

One focus of this Panel was on how carriers can assess the health of their networks with respect to measurement and power efficiency. 

• That is, how may carriers evaluate how effectively they are making measurements in their network(s), and how well they are using those measurements?
• Likewise, how may carriers evaluate how power-efficient their networks and deployed systems are?

Finally, having assessed where they are on the performance spectrum, how may carriers institute changes and/or adopt new systems/processes/techniques, or use new software solutions to improve operations in these two areas, to lower their TCO.

A second focus was on solutions/strategies and techniques that the eco-system players (vendors, integrators, software-systems providers) are making available/developing to help carriers do a better job in these two areas, thus helping carriers improve operations (thus reducing costs).

Stay tuned for the exciting details and panel excerpts in a subsequent blog post!

In the meantime, what do you think of emerging markets? How are the operator’s needs there different than in developed markets? And, do markets like India provide a model for issues in emerging markets in general?

Do weigh in with your opinions and thoughts!