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What Enterprises Want

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VoicenData Bureau
New Update

With businesses taking a 24/7 approach to working, efficient

and intelligent networking has become an absolute necessity for the smooth

functioning of any industry. And, mobility being the buzzword in today's

communication arena- companies are gearing up to deploy integrated, wireless

and convergent networks.

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Today, highly flexible and sound networks are required for an

infrastructure that will enable advanced, new services that mobile and fixed

network operators are expected to offer in the future-while continuing to

support all of today's existing services. Not just the industry's, the

consumer's expectation from broadband services and 3G are also very high.

Hence, service providers and equipment and platform manufacturers and vendors

have to make sure that services live up to the hype.

Today's businesses, service providers and vendors are

striving to make a mark within this expanding competitive landscape by searching

for ways to brand and bundle new services, reduce operational costs, and

strategically position themselves in relation to their competition. In this race

to emerge as the most technically advanced, Next Generation Networks such as IP,

VoIP, VPN etc offer accurate and efficient solutions.

What are your expectations from Next Generation Networks?

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Vikram Srihari, global VP-IT, Opelin Laboratories They need to be robust and broadband. I believe that

broadband has arrived in a big way after being in the shadows for a long time,

and so it's this technology which will take us to the future. Whatever

networks throw up should guarantee connectivity 24/7. This can be obtained only

through a combination of many things such as Wi-Fi and broadband in terms of

optical fibre. Moreover, we should be able to connect laptops, mobiles, PDAs; in

other words, interoperability is the need of the hour. Next Generation Networks

(NGNs) should guarantee connectivity, broadband and scalability almost like

video on demand.

In the field of developing or deploying next gen networks we

are still very young, as we started much later than the Western countries. So we

didn't have to grapple with many issues that they had to, such as the various

protocols that they have in their countries. In India we just have GSM which

runs all over the country. As in CDMA, we are not even in generation 4 yet

although we do have the complexity of WLL, which gives us a set kilometer of

distance and mobility. IT and telecom are very convergent fields and the point

is to use IT as an enabler to maintain high level of connectivity at a very high

bandwidth, as that's the order of the day. Another important requirement is

that redundancy has to be maintained at all costs-if one avenue of

communication is unable to connect us, we should have an alternate medium to be

able to do so.

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Sunil Kapoor, CIO, Fortis Healthcare The next generation networks have to be dependable and

wireless. Dependability means having 5 9s of uptime, ping time which are

workable on some applications. It also means reaching not only the metros but

also the smaller towns and cities. For dependability we can also include

security and secure networks, and the SLA we have with respect to uptime. By

wireless it would mean that we are able to connect anything, anywhere. Wi-Fi has

come into computers, and similar technology can be developed for mobiles, be it

for commercial purposes or personal. We should move forward from requiring a

hotspot to accessing a Wi-Fi zone-why can't it be like the air card is? For

example, VoIP should go on wireless without any requirement of a wire or a

cable. Speed on Wi-Fi has to increase. Wi-Fi on the LAN itself has to go up; it's

still limited, as we cannot do high-end graphics on it.

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Anil Porter, head-IT and Telecom, Galileo India There are a lot of networks which are gaining popularity

today. There's VPN. There has been lot of VPN deployment and VPN, as a

technology, has really started mushrooming. Another network creating a buzz is

MPLS. Everybody is upgrading to become MPLS-compatible. At the end of the day

what matters to the user is that he should be able to use that network to

maximum comfort. So the important thing for next generation networks, or

whichever future technology we talk about, is security-that it is integrated

with other networks and is secure; there are no trojans or worms running around

in the network, choking your throughput. Once we have taken care of all this,

irrespective of what protocol the application is using, it should be able to

provide a good integrated platform. Integration right now is a humongous task.

Thus, the future network should evolve in such a way that it gives you comfort

of integration, of a discreet stand-alone application. Networks need to act like

a media; application overheads need to be reduced and integration issues need to

be made easier. Future networks should have high uptime up to the last mile. A

lot of improvement needs to be done in the infrastructure alone.

There would be a lot of cross value-added products associated

with NGNs. For example, smart cards, blue tooth-which is still insecure but

might evolve into NGN if its range can be expanded. Cost of networks need to

come down further. They have to be dependable, in terms of uptime to the last

mile. Telcos have brought in fibre to the building structure but it's on ring

architecture and more than a single damage to it will leave us in the cold.

Wireless will evolve in terms of higher and higher

throughputs with lot of security built into it in terms of access. On the basic

networks such as telecom networks the futuristic aspects need to be addressed

very extensively. Apart from being MPLS, lot many applications should run on the

same network.

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Akhil Pandey, head-IT, NDPL Networks that we are deploying are in themselves proving to

be Next Generation as we are connecting 152 collection centers, and for the

first time the distribution management would be fully computerized. As we are

into power distribution networks, our model is consumer centric and we need to

meet the expectations of the consumer so we require very high degree of network

availability and very fast networks. Reaction time needs to be in milliseconds.

The network needs to reliable, with speed and accuracy. It should also guarantee

confidentiality of data. It should be scalable and changeable, where performance

monitoring can be done.

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Raman Bansal, chief Systems manager, CRIS NGNs need to cater to all types of multimedia applications.

By multimedia I mean multiple medium of contact, data applications, real-time

applications, or video conferencing. They need to be integrated with end user

business applications in the high way, and also put in an interface with

business applications. They need to provide freedom of choosing from various

service providers, choosing the types of services we want and are offered by

various service providers, and the freedom to do all this on the fly. For this

we need real time online identification and authorization functions to be in

place. Mobility has to be maintained irrespective of the location of the user.

Uptime reliability and security are common issues, so it's assumed that they

are taken care of in the next generation networks. In fact, a better parameter

to describe the requirements would be desired quality of service. Everybody from

NGN should accept that he should be able to have multiple types of media such as

real-time voice, music, video data services, etc. Such services have to be

supported on a unified network because these applications have inherently

different characteristics so an appropriate quality of service is required to be

provided by the networks in order to support these services. Quality of service

parameters are availability of bandwidth, delay on the network, the delay

variation that we know by the name of jitter, packet loss. These are the four

parameters used to mathematically define quality of service. Next Generation

Networks must be able to address these requirements most comprehensively.

What challenges do you expect to face?

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Sunil Kapoor The challenges while deploying NGNs is to assure

dependability in terms of uptime and reach, proper availability and bandwidth

with the price attached to it. Infrastructure to deploy networks and last mile

connectivity is not available in the metros. Technology is not an issue, whereas

a weak infrastructure causes problems related to dependability, availability and

reach. Security would be a challenge everywhere and it's a continuous battle;

we can't solve it by fighting a small war.

Anil Porter The biggest challenge will be the cost incurred. We will have

to upgrade our CPE, switches and routers. Another major concern will be the

effect they will have on existing networks; will they take the legacy forward

and be compatible? Cost also depends on how the network equipment price will

behave-will it be high or low, or can the same equipment be used. Deploying

NGNs will be a challenge if they require drastic change. NGNs will be able to

address the issues of security and storage successfully. They will have to go

beyond L3 to give the comfort factor to service providers. They have to think

about giving more business security than operation.

Akhil Pandey The technology, that is all the routers and switches, have to

be imported, thus the cost incurred is high. Getting the right kind of

technology is also another challenge as the technology is changing at a very

fast pace. Availability of the right kind of technical expertise, the right kind

of trained professionals to work on and maintain the networks, forces us to

outsource work. Security, on the other hand, is a known devil and there are ways

and means to deal with it.

Vikram Srihari The challenges that we'll face would be from the business

point of view. That is to convince businesses to invest in next gen networks.

Because technological advancements are happening at a very fast pace, making

long-term plans is practically impossible. Thus, choosing a network and

deploying it is a challenging task in itself. Security is another major cause

for concern because when we talk about Wi-Fi leakage, it is a very critical

problem-it's just like tapping a phone, but in a wireless network. Hence,

provisions have to be made to provide adequately secure networks, and also to

deal with access and control issues which emerge with deployment of next

generation networks.

Raman Bansal Challenges are directly related to user expectations that

would require the mix of various services on next gen networks. This is easier

said than done. We do have some enabling technologies in place to provision all

these technologies on a single network but a lot of this is yet to be achieved.

For example, support of session initiation protocol (SIP) on mobile networks is

yet to be done, especially when we talk of mobile networks; availability of

bandwidth is itself an issue; GPRS within 2.5 g is also not available. When we

limit our vision to our country these are the challenges.

Sonia Sharma

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