Renewing the Backbone

India is experiencing continuous subscriber growth, and global trends demonstrate we can see an explosion in data transmission

India has become a global power house; renowned internationally for its top-flight entrepreneurs, software development industry, business process outsourcing, and it’s phenomenal economic development and market growth, especially in the telecommunication sector, a segment that’s already poised for modernization despite being young in the market.

Growing Pains

With the policies for economic liberalization starting in the 1980s, India was well positioned for the IT boom experienced in the 1990s and today, it ranks within the top 10 countries worldwide in terms of gross domestic product, and is the world’s second largest mobile phone market with over 881 mn subscribers.

However with such exponential growth in subscribers, devices, and overall traffic, comes the inevitable impact on network performance and service quality.

Another challenge to India’s continued economic growth is the impact on telecommunication quality and reliability that the rapid national infrastructure construction has had, through frequent cuts in fiber optic cables laid across the country, caused subscribers to experience regular network outages.

Additionally, with the potential for consolidation in the Indian telecommunication industry, service providers can expect to deal with even more legacy network infrastructure issues as various networks are combined and upgraded.

And the challenges are not merely qualitative, in an open competitive market focused on subscriber growth and geographic reach, business profitability challenges manifest themselves through low Average Revenue Per User (ARPU); India currently ranks among the lowest subscriber ARPUS in the world.

Innovation to the Rescue

Slowing down on subscriber growth and geographic reach, especially to rural India, is not in the country’s best interest, since the key to India’s continued economic development is to harness the country’s vast human resources—something networks are designed to do.

Clearly, these are the major challenges to profitable network growth. So, how can the Indian service providers address these issues?

Fortunately, a number of recent technology innovations have been proven successful in tackling the rising costs associated with service provider network expansion, as well as enabling improvements in network reliability and increasing service offerings.

At the foundation of service provider networks, is the optical transmission technology, commonly referred to as Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM). Recent innovations, such as coherent transmission, have enabled a 10-fold increase in transmission rates to 100 gigabits per second, without a corresponding cost increase. Over the last 3 years, globally, the service providers have been actively deploying this new technology to address exponential network traffic growth costeffectively. 100 Gbps will make India’s

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network backbone the highest capacity available to meet bandwidth demands.

However this technology is limited in its ability to handle the now ubiquitous Ethernet traffic, as well as high transmission speeds such as 100 Gbps. However a new evolutionary technology known as Optical Transport Network (OTN) has emerged as the solution to address this problem. Even progressive service providers in India have begun to explore this technology, and some have even started to deploy it. OTN will make India’s backbone much more manageable to turn bandwidth into differentiated services.

While traditional optical backbone networks have been either linear or ring formations, the significant number of fiber cuts that occur all over in India have driven service providers to explore mesh architectures for these networks. Optical mesh networks have been enabled by a technology known as ‘intelligent control plane’. In the event of fiber cuts or nodal failures, this intelligent software ‘knows’ what links remain active in the network and is able to intelligently and automatically re-route traffic over those links in near real-time to ensure reliable services.

What’s Next is Now

When these innovations are coupled together—coherent 100 Gbps DWDM, OTN, intelligent control plane, and an associated multi-layer management solution—a clear evolutionary path for service provider backbone network upgrades becomes quite apparent.

A path that not only addresses the expected explosive network growth, but is also able to to do so cost-effectively, with the right quality, reliability, and service offerings. The author is CEO, Ciena Networks

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