“The shift toward open-source and disaggregation is visible”

Rajesh Gangadhar

CTO - Access Solutions, STL

The telecom industry witnessed some major technology shifts in 2020-21. The year marked the start of an unparalleled decade of network creation. The pandemic has had a significant impact on network upgrades, expansion, and adoption of innovative technology and solutions by operators. Telecom companies around the world have stepped up their investments in broadband digital network infrastructure.

Digital infrastructure has emerged as the hero of the current times as it created a significant impact on all aspects of human life, across each demographic and every country. Additionally, digital infrastructure was the backbone for enterprises in ensuring business continuity going forward. Some technology trends shaping the digital infrastructure and telecom industry are as follows.

5G technology: With 113 operators launching 5G in 48 countries, roughly 229 million 5G connections were established at an adoption rate that was four times faster. While there have been 300 pre-commercial trials in 31 nations, India has initiated its own 5G trials. 5G is set to be a game-changer for the industry. For India specifically, 5G will create some of the best use cases like e-education, remote working, healthcare, and industrial automation. In the near future, 5G will be proved as a means for humans and machines to collaborate seamlessly and work with data available in real-time.

The pandemic has had a significant impact on network upgrades, expansion, and adoption of innovative technology and solutions by operators.

Open and virtual networks leading to 5G: To unleash the full potential of 5G, the telecom service providers will need to adopt open networking architecture and build virtualized and open RAN. Some of the big telcos have already realised this notion and are taking big steps.

Optical fiber: Network creators are investing heavily in digital networks built on the back of optical fiber. Some global fiber to the home (FTTH) connectivity initiatives, include the UK Openreach program and the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) in the US. The optical fiber segment witnessed a growth momentum on the back of FTTH deployments.

Telco clouds: Telco cloud has now become a buzzword for telecom modernization as operators transform their networks to fully virtualized network functions (NFV), disaggregate software from hardware in a data center model, provide the scale, and agility to orchestrate various vendor-agnostic 5G services and applications. Service providers are now building a telco cloud environment that spans across multi-vendor and multi-site cloud infrastructures, designed to meet the performance and scalability requirements that 5G will require. The Indian telco cloud market is estimated to grow approximately 20% annually.

Hyperscalers making a mark in telco edge space: While 5G networks are expected to provide virtually unlimited gigabit and ultra-reliable connections, anytime, anywhere, edge computing is a natural element of 5G, helping to satisfy its throughput, latency, scalability, and automation targets. It also offers additional privacy and security. For telcos, edge computing offers an opportunity to generate new revenue streams from enterprise customers that will need to rely on their mobile and fixed networks; telcos will need to orchestrate a broader partner ecosystem to capitalize on the edge computing market.

To unleash the full potential of 5G, the telecom service providers will need to adopt open networking architecture and build virtualized and open RAN.

There are also many collaborations happening between hyper-scale cloud service providers like Azure, AWS, and telecom service providers, primarily aimed at bringing cloud computing capabilities to the network. The collaborations will help telcos develop applications that require significantly reduced latency, strengthen processing power and analytics capabilities.

Obstacles for the industry

Super-fast network modernization will be one of the major challenges for telecom networks. The faster legacy networks migrate to newer architecture, the faster digital transformation will be for everyone.

Capex allocations, 5G network architecture that seamlessly integrates with existing 4G LTE network, and network rollout and deployment time frames, all must be streamlined to transform India into the 5G ecosystem. Deep fibreisation is another critical infrastructure investment required to achieve gigabit speeds at the network edge. With only about 30% of cell towers fibreised in India, this remains the single biggest challenge to surmount.

Remedies for telcos

India has the second-largest telecom market in the world, and we have come a long way. For the next phase of development, based on digital transformation, the telcos will need to opt for solutions such as making an ecosystem of skilled professionals who can take up the fibreisation to the next level if the country needs to be fibreised at four times the current pace.

The focus needs to be on incentivising high-tech local manufacturing, which will not only boost innovation but also create higher-paying jobs. There is also a need for innovative offerings like indoor small cells that offer a low-cost and agile means for faster 5G readiness, improving the economics for digital service providers and enterprises. New network architectures with network slicing and agility are required. This will happen when programmable networks which are open source and disaggregated are deployed.

What more can the telcos do?

5G and FTTH present great opportunities for the Indian telecom sector to be at the forefront. Though implementation of 5G is slow compared to other nations, the ecosystem required is being created at a pace. Mammoth telecom infrastructure needs to be modernized and integrated with new technologies. The role of digital network integration becomes pivotal in this context. This is also the best time for India to not only adopt open networking technology but also create an ecosystem of components and solutions that are world-class and make the adoption of 5G a breeze.

Future for technology

Building networks closer to the edge is getting a lot of attention because it provides low latency, high agility, and a terrific customer experience. Gartner predicts that by 2025, over 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed at the edge, as against 10% in 2018. The shift toward open-source and disaggregation can also be seen.

Going forward, seamless convergence of wireless and wired networks will allow for extremely fast communication at a low cost. By combining connection, computing, and storage, new generation networks are becoming more intelligent. Going forward, a few critical factors will write India’s 5G and digital story. How telecom networks of India will adapt to new architectures and how the government and private players will come together to build the next generation of digital infrastructure, the answers to these questions will shape the future for us.

For telcos, edge computing offers an opportunity to generate new revenue streams from enterprise customers that will need to rely on their mobile and fixed networks.