The telecom sector in India has experienced more changes in the last decade than in its entire history due to regulatory liberalisation, structural reforms, growth demands and competition, making it one of the major catalysts in India’s growth story.
Urgency to innovate
As a market, India is known for assimilating newer generation technologies without actually undergoing the traditional upgrade cycle. Thus, the urgency to innovate in the network is even higher.
We are moving from an incremental world to one where things happen on an exponential scale. What used to be millions of customers, devices and transactions is now in the billions. Let’s put this in perspective. India's mobile phone subscribers' base touched 910 million in 2013 among which 200 million were active Internet users. The number of smartphones used worldwide recently surpassed the 1 billion-unit mark for the first time ever in the third quarter of 2012.
Content creation
The rise in customers heralding the telecom boom has significantly changed their behaviour in data consumption. Earlier, the consumers had limited options in accessing data for their requirements, especially in the PC era. In the post PC era, the nature of content consumed has grown from just textual to multimedia. As the mobile internet brings billions of new devices online, cloud computing puts unimaginable processing power in the hands of anyone with a basic Internet connection and the processing demands of big data now mean that even the fastest computers systems today are sure to be inadequate tomorrow.
The world outside the network has changed in the past five years and yet the core architecture of today’s networks hasn’t. The best analogy for this situation is something we experience every day, the roads in our cities. The road network has not kept pace with the sheer increase in the number of cars coming into our roads. The communications network has it worse; it’s not just the volume but also access patterns and the value of the information that travels over it. And unlike the roads in our cities, modern day networks don’t sleep at night. Globalisation and the Internet has made it a 24 hour affair.
Constraints
A recent Forrester Consulting survey commissioned by Juniper Networks found that this relentless increase is about to run up against the constraints of a limited resource – the capacity of the networks that connect everything together. By adding to the same old networks, businesses are building a system of systems that becomes less efficient. This creates complexity, decreases performance, and raises costs, all without delivering new interconnections that customers and partners really need. We are reaching the point where the effectiveness of legacy networks is inversely proportional to the volume of information they contain and the power of the resources that they make available.
Innovative technologies such as Software Defined Networks (SDN) are being developed to address complexities that erstwhile dumb pipe or the network is facing. They hold a tremendous amount of promise for addressing new requirements needed for the future of networking. However, these technologies are still at a nascent stage and will require time to develop. These innovations hold a lot of promise going ahead and we need to embrace them in the form of a focused vision, comprehensive approach and clearly defined principles to help customers adopt it within their businesses. The combination of optimised hardware together with the disruptive technologies mentioned above will allow service providers to build the best possible networks and transition from traditional infrastructures to handle any future requirements.
Simple solutions
So what can we do to prevent networks from reaching a tipping point while ensuring that they support future requirements?
As a first step, we need to stop thinking about incremental improvements or ‘band-aid’ solutions to current problems. Think more strategically about the scale and nature of the business we will be supporting in the future.
Firms in the future will require a simplified architecture and an open, programmable network if they are going to adapt to the changing business environment. If service providers can deliver this, it will help them realising business benefits of increased revenue, higher customer loyalty, and lower operating costs.
Finally, service providers need to interface with customers and challenge themselves to determine if they are ready to offer similar services in the future to either existing customers or prospects. This will give them an understanding of the underlying problems and give them time to implement appropriate solutions.
Simply put, we need to stop looking at the network as if it were a dumb pipe. Think about this every time you drive and wish that your city administrators would think ahead and build for the future instead of making do with the existing infrastructure built when your parents got their first car. Unlike the roads in our cities, it is a whole lot simpler to build a new network.
(The author is Managing Director, Juniper Networks India.)