From local to global

Telecommunication is a success story in the 72 years of independence that has metamorphosed India on to the world stage and has benefited the common man and, knowledge based services as well as the elite of the society. It is so far the fourth dimension of transportation after land, sea and air. Space may be the next dimension of transportation, hopefully.

Technology, applications and regulation

The combination of technology, applications and regulation has brought in competition, affordability; usage enhanced and of course issues relating to security, there by resulting in the commoditisation of telecommunications.

From an abysmally low tele-density of less than a tenth of a percent at the time of independence it has touched to the present level of 59% (as of Dec 2018) (most of it, though, in the last 15 years). More than 98% of the telephone density as well as market are contributed by mobile (wireless).

Having a phone at home meant that one is some one of very high standing in the society or a very senior government executive. From “Aap katar mein hain, kripya pratiksha kijiye” literally translated means “you are in a queue, please wait”, the country now have katar (queue) of telemarketers bending over backwards to offer mobile phones.

In the days gone by it was pretty normal to wait for 12 hours for a phone call from Delhi to Jaipur or calling fiancé from the jungles of Assam, hilltops and valleys of J&K (while installing microwave stations in the mid ‘60s) to Calcutta or any other place and that too after walking some few miles either to a post office or to the high and mighty.

The joke used to be that if you wanted a phone for your ward, book it when you got married; 10 to 15 years was the norm.

All this commoditization is the end product of the evolution or emergence of regulation, technology and applications in telecom. It is all changed for the benefit of common person, the society and India.

Connectivity has brought jobs and increased knowledge based export of services. For example, in 1991, the knowledge-based export used to be about USD 40 million and in December 2018, it was more than USD 125 billion.

Knowledge-based industry has generated employment for millions of our youths. The industry is world’s most competitive and fastest growing

How all this happened?

Emerging technologies, miniaturisation and their applications? The technology moved away from wires strung on poles, to coaxial cables, satellites, fibre and from Analogue to Digital connectivity resulting in many fold increases in capacities for both domestic and international digital connectivity?

Internet, international connectivity has increased from some 2000 simultaneous conversations to god alone knows how many! From a meagre few megahertz (bits) in 1991 to terahertz (bits) today resulting in from hours of wait time to get connected, we get connected in the blink of an eye.

The connectivity bandwidth has evolved from 90 bits per second in the 19th century to hundred (100) terabits or so in the 21st century. Strong policy support from the government has also been crucial to the sector’s development. FDI cap in the telecom sector has been increased to 100%. The National Digital Communication policy, 2018 is expected to catalyse the growth further. Investment of USD 100 billion is envisaged in this sector by 2022.

5G connectivity, though delayed, will take the growth of the sector and in economy to mind boggling imagination. It is expected to be playing lead role to USD 5-trillion economy. Telecommunications in India is in process of transformation to next generation network.

Rural connectivity

The rural connectivity is still a concern and it has not yet reached the depth and breadth of India and many parts of the world as much as country would like it to have connected. There exists a significant rural-urban divide to date, in addition to the digital divide. There were plans to provide for a phone in every village; something that has been talked about for nearly two decades; however it is yet to be achieved in its entirety.

The government has stated that under the Bharat Nirman Programme, it will be ensured that all revenue villages in the country, with fibre/mobile connectivity, shall be covered and assistance for both capital as well as operational expenditure and network are being connected over the fibre-optic band. In fact, all the blocks in the country are connected on fibre. Efforts are on to connect all Panchayat on the fibre network.

Rural connectivity has the potential to bring enormous benefits to the telecoms sector on its own and to the economy of India on the whole. Over 70% of India is rural. Giving access to a human being of any kind has the potential to unravel the power of human innovation and entrepreneurship.

Rural connectivity will not only provide a growth engine for the telecoms industry, but, at the same time there will be improved opportunities for our rural people.

Telecoms connectivity will act as a catalyst to better education; bring improved market access for their products; provide improved employment prospects, and provide for greater purchasing power in their hands. As an example, connectivity sent quality grapes of Narayangaon, an obscure village in Maharashtra, to the shelves of Sainsbury in the UK in 1993. All this is because of the conversion of telecomm from being an elitist’s tool to common man’s support!

Connectivity has become that vital tool in the hands of every discipline, health, medicine, agriculture, entertainment and technology. Connectivity has provided flow or transportation of information at speeds of light, which has changed the way we live, think and execute; yearning for more of the same with each passing second. One may live without food, but without connectivity, everybody feels helpless.

International connectivity: bridge to globalization

Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL), as called earlier, and now Tata Communication Ltd (TCL) had the foresight and vision of the need to bridge the digital divide in early 90s when India decided to open up. Against all odds, VSNL invested in state of the art digital undersea cables SEA-ME-WEI, 2, 3 and now in SEA-ME-WEI4 FLAG. The private sector picked up and augmented the International Capacity.

Players like Airtel, Reliance, BSNL, Vodafone, etc., have added capacity multifold in the international submarine communications. Most of the International Submarine cables are touching and landing at different parts of the country. International communication route to India touches both from Atlantic and Pacific.

Another submarine with assistance from Japan is in pipeline from Chennai to Andaman Nicobar Islands. A submarine connectivity is already in place from North East region of the country through Bangladesh.

Currently, 97% of the international communication traffic is through submarine cable only and 3% of the communication traffic is through satellites. It may be mentioned that number of satellite transponders in use in the country has also increased manifold. The success story of growth of satellite communication is similar to telecommunication sector (terrestrial, wireless and submarine).

Turmoil in telecom sector

The global telecoms industry went through a period of turmoil during the early part of the new millennium. The domestic Indian market was largely protected from this due to the growth phase that it was in.

However, as an example, some very large undersea optical fiber network players got overextended and in financial trouble. A number of Indian giants saw these distressed assets as an opportunity for India and they bought them at reasonable prices.

Reliance ADA Group bought FLAG Telecom, of the UK; and Tata, through its VSNL subsidiary, bought Teleglobe of Canada and Tyco Global Network of the US.

These acquired companies are now once again major players in global networks. Now that the global capacity glut has been worked off, prices for bandwidth are once again on the rise. This means that the Indian telecom has the opportunity to have the same kind of disruptive effect on the global telecom industry that the country’s software industry is having on tech services.

The potential for Indian companies to connect countries in SE Asia and Africa so far have been on the other side of the digital divide with global connectivity encircling the whole globe with fiber loops has huge implications for developing nations. This means everybody gets equal access to bandwidth.

Indian companies are contributing to the global economy as now there will be an opportunity for other emerging nations to have a shot at the global economy just like India did a decade ago

With the high quality international and national telecommunication network, and world class IT and management professionals, India has become one of the most preferred destinations for sourcing software and IT enabled services. In comparison to other low cost locations, India ranks high in several critical parameters including the level of government support; quality of the labour pool; English language skills; cost advantage; project management skills, entrepreneurial culture, strong customer relationships and exposure to new technologies, industry's strong focus on quality software and processes, Institutes of Science and Technology, R&D Laboratories.

However, more needs to be done to develop the R&D environment. Enabling further industry collaboration with our premier institutions of higher learning will augment the talent pool for R&D and in turn facilitate development of state-of-the-art technology. This is needed not just to benefit the global economy but to also promote country specific innovation.

We are on the brink of a revolution in India. Indian companies are enhancing their global service delivery capabilities through a combination of green field initiatives, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, partnerships and alliances with local players. Telecoms connectivity is at the heart of this revolution.

Regulation: All-pervasive essential

Proper regulation is especially important in telecom as is the importance of intellectual property and industry standards. Global rules of the game have traditionally been set largely by the U.S., together with Europe, with others coerced and cajoled to go along.

But, the developing countries are beginning to resist and this is leading to increasing divisions within the developed world about what should be the rules of the game. Success has always entailed trying to shape, understand, and take advantage of “regulatory” environment. This will continue to be case in the future.

However, it will be more complex both politically and economically. There are risks and uncertainties about future directions of the global economy and this will require diversified approaches. The guiding principles will still be around more openness, less protection, more competition.

This is an area that India has been slow to react to. Technology evolution or emergence is irrelevant in the absence of proper regulation. For close to fifty years we suffered from no regulation because of government monopoly and a vice like control in telecomm sector.

In 1997, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) was set up to strike a balance between a government monopoly and private sector companies. Had that not been done, the fruits of technology and applications would not have been possible for bringing in commoditisation of telecomm connectivity

At present, regulatory issues related to telecom in India are in the process of maturation, most tariffs are forborne providing healthy competition. There are remnant issues of spectrum pricing which are getting resolved to be in line with international best practices to establish the true economical value of this scare national resource.

Nonetheless, this seems to be set to change in the backdrop of a clarion call by none other than the Prime Minister to allocate this national resource in an equitable, fair and transparent manner keeping an eye on the revenue generation potential. Pressures from various quarters are turning the policy on its head and 5G spectrum is headed towards auctions, a well established global practice.

This would indicate maturation of the Indian telecom sector and also lead to the true economic value of spectrum to accrue to the public exchequer, which can be further used by the government for social purposes. Success has always entailed combining local and global knowledge and best practice. As the Indian telecom industry and the regulatory environment develops and matures, Indian policy makers should push for a larger say in global matters.

Telecom network security

The communications network worldwide, about a decade ago, was a mix of circuit and packet based technology. The public switch Telephone Network (PSTN) in India, replaced older circuit based technology like cross Bar and Strologer exchanges. PSTN network which made use of switched technology is replaced, now in the country by a packet-based switching, both in terrestrial and wireless.

The infrastructure is made up of digital switches, much of which is connected through conical, fibre-optic cables and submarine fibre cables running in single and multimode with minimum of 64 pairs of fibre cables. Such a technology was developed with growing demand of video and data services.

Earlier, technologies like ATM and ISDN could not handle the multimedia applications. The wireless mobile evolved from SMS to 3G, GPRS, EDGE, LTE, LTA, Internet Protocol (IP) are current backbone structure. The trend is to move towards 5G next generation technologies which would offer seamless connectivity with low latency and higher bandwidth to billions of heterogeneous devices wide range of competitors’, mobile phones, devices, drones, health equipment, industry and defence.

The Indian Government has already planned to conduct field trials so as to undertake feasibility for deploying 5G. A complex Next Generation Communication network is on the way in the next 2-3 years.

The security of telecom networks has been around from the time networks were set up. Over the past 30-35 years or so, the expansion of networking, especially the increased reliance on networks and Internet both as an avenue for commerce and as the business backbone has created challenges which are getting more complex and also enter new type of industry that did not earlier exist. The important features are:

* Telecommunication networks today present a convergence of several technologies PSTN, 2G, 3G and 4G with vital networks. These components are Access network Application and Management Network External Network.

* The interconnection interface due to of different technologies exposes the intruders and increases the potential for virus, worms such as Code-Red, Sass software. Such attacks may be from external sources. In such cases a telecommunication network is vulnerable radio path of the access and core network.

* Attacks on one telecommunication network and segment could also spread to multiple network interconnection interfaces. This possibility of intruders gaining access irrespective of geographical location terminal.

* Such security challenges in telecommunication networks have been growing from the past decade and emerging more complex now and in the near future. Telecommunication networks are under variety of attacks which were/are subjected hither to computer system. Some of these attacks are like Denial of service (DoS), Distributed Denial of services (DDoS), spamming, DNS (Domain Name system), poisoning, spoofing, malware propagation to choke bandwidth phishing, pharming, distribution of malware.

The unauthorized physical access to switching equipment, malware attack on authentication equipment; Home location Register (HLR); Visitor Location register(VLR), interception of voice traffic due to absence of encryption unauthorised Interception of signal and information and surveillance, so called covert surveillance including Tapping of online chat.

The recent case of NSO-WhatsApp related to interception of on-line chats and message is example of emerging cyber security challenges. Malicious software scripts called “malware” are injected through variety of means and different forms of attacks are launched thus endangering the communication networks and assets connected on the networks.

Such attacks result in espionage, stealing of data, stealing of identity credentials, traffic re-routing (using DNS attacks), and harvesting of data and information. Advance persistent threat vectors (APT), (consisting complex malware) are introduced to attack from any jurisdiction in the world to disrupt and damage the networks.

Companies, critical sectors and the Government are increasingly using telecomm infrastructure of private operators. The security challenges in the telecom networks are posing serious challenges which are expected to become complex especially in the age of AI, ML, Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing.

Telecom security

The overall goal of telecom network security is primarily based on the premise of protecting the safe, trusted telecomm network from the dangerous and unknown external factors. However such approaches do not entirely secure the network as the perpetrators do not always operate from within the country but on a global basis.

The traditional model of security, however, is being challenged with the innovations in technology software tools and seamless connectivity of heterogeneous devices. It is interesting to note that all the telecomm networks deploy the basic architecture for the security based on old military strategies of creating layers of protection around the most valuable resources.

All telecom networks are configured in rings and zone and deploys systems, which provide perimeter and DNS and DDOS, DMZ (de-Militarised zone) security. However, preventing spam, malwares and intervention is a challenge in the networks in India

The growth of telecommunications in the world and in India coupled with advance in technology will continue due to unquenched thirst for the acquisition of information. We are truly moving towards knowledge base information society. We want information and access to information anywhere and anytime.

It is, however, difficult to predict what telecomm networks will emerge together with challenges of their security. It is anybody’s guess, may be proverbial tip of iceberg for what is yet to come to stay connected in future.

- Dr. Gulshan Rai and BK Syngal

- BK Syngal is the former CMD, VSNL and Dr. Gulshan Rai is former National Cyber Security Co-ordinator.