The real challenge lies in the bandwidth management: Ryan Perera, India Country Head, Ciena

By Krishna Mukherjee

Even though 100G deployment is pervasive in India, bandwidth management remains an issue, says

Ryan Perera, India Country Head at Ciena. In an interview with Voice&Data, he talks about the solutions

to eliminate network congestion and how SDN and NFV can help telcos in managing cost.

Voice&Data: How is Ciena banking upon the growing telecom market in India?

Ryan Perera: If you look at the Indian telecom market, you have about 900 mn mobile subscribers in the country and it is one of the fastest growing telecom industries in the market. By 2020, it is likely to cross about 1.2 bn in subscriber base numbers. Of the 900 mn subscribers, currently, hardly 250 mn use mobile data. For the full 900 mn to start using data (facebook, you tube, etc), two fundamental things are required – an affordable smartphone and high speed connectivity. I think, the first puzzle has been solved with the availability of a number of affordable smartphones in the market today. So, what is yet to be resolved is high speed connectivity through 3G or 4G. The country has predominantly 2G so operators have to migrate from 2G to 3G, 4G and that will fuel the data growth.

So, I talked about broadband connectivity and when you are building broadband networks, couple of things are required. First of all you need spectrum, that’s what the wireless people do but you need to connect them together – you need to connect within the country, outside the country. For that, you need to build long haul networks, very high speed multi-terabit long haul networks and this is where Ciena plays a role. Today, we are five out of seven leading operators in core network in India.

Ciena plays its role in the form of connectivity. We are in the business of connecting the networks and making the internet go round. On the core networks and metro networks, we supply to five leading operators in the country.

Voice&Data: How are you expanding your presence in the country?

Ryan Perera: We are lead supplier to all four submarine operators in the country—Tata Communications, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Reliance Globalcom – and we are also increasing our presence in access network, last mile access network, and fiber access network.

Voice&Data: How are you differentiating from other players?

Ryan Perera: Our USP varies from sector to sector. The USP in long haul is different from metro, so maybe it narrows down to wireless backhaul. Our USP is high capacity scalable networks that are resilient to the Indian environment packet networks.

Voice&Data: Security always remains a key concern. What would you like to say about that?

Ryan Perera: Security is a very broad subject – internal and external. There are some companies which deploy their own security solutions to make sure that nothing falls in the hands of unintended people. We do multiple things in order to prevent hacking. A lot of security measures are there, there are encryption techniques. Operators put their own security and rely on us also and so, there are multiple levels of protection. But if you are deploying a vendor to build a network you have to trust the vendor. A vendor has a lot of responsibility and operators cannot run a security mechanism without having that strong trust with the vendor. In fact, we are suppliers to defense organization around the world.

Voice&Data: What is the current state of 100G deployment in India and what are the challenges related

to it?

Ryan Perera: The rising adoption of big data and the surge in digital and social media content are driving 100G deployments in India. In fact, in India, we have the largest deployments in 100G, optical transport network (OTN) and control plane. 100 G is running but it alone cannot solve the problem, you have to manage the bandwidth. This is just like a road system, you build a big road to eliminate congestion but the traffic gets hit at a junction. So, actually the challenge is with bandwidth management. That’s why operators just don’t want 100G they need the control plane to manage the bandwidth. They need the OTN and packet switching in order to use the bandwidth. These have to come into play then only you can improve congestion.

Voice&Data: What type of benefits can be drawn from SDN and NFV?

Ryan Perera: So now, you have got the bandwidth, it is going up, but the revenues of the operators are just plateauing. With rise in bandwidth, the profitability is going down as operators can’t charge you in sync with the swelling bandwidth. To manage the cost, you need to use your infrastructure very efficiently. You need to virtualize your resources and make sure that the profitability does not go down. So, this whole attempt of virtualizing the network is done with the help of SDN and NFV.

Voice&Data: Are there any plans to expand your product portfolio?

Ryan Perera: At present, we have Ciena open architecture. Under which, we have OPN, we have a product category called Agility. On the Agility, we are providing a number of SDN and NFV types of products. We always continue to expand. Broadly, transport, switching and packet networking and then various efforts to virtualize networks are the focus areas.

Voice&Data: Do you have any plans to manufacture in India, keeping in view the ‘Make in India’ project?

Ryan Perera: In India, our primary focus is R&D, we have two centers here. We believe that major part of

the value is added not though manufacturing but through R&D.

Voice&Data: What type of growth opportunities you see in India?

Ryan Perera: We see a lot of growth potential in India. It has got a lot of latent demand, with long-haul

core networks going fairly stable.