Indian telecom service providers (telecoms) have started deploying — on pilot basis — Cisco’s Quantum solution.
The networking major is also in talks with telecom operators to provide its Quantum solution that enables SP’s to capture data in motion. It enables SP’s to expand to non-traditional markets and disrupt value chains.
More than 200 telecom operators are using the solution globally. Cisco did not name Indian telecoms which are on pilots.
Since Indian telecom operators are facing lower profitability due to lower ARPUs, Cisco’s Quantum enhances their chances of finding more revenue streams and improve profitability.
New networking solutions are important for Indian telecoms at a time when the outlook for the sector is not rosy. As per a note in January 2013, India Ratings’ outlook on the Indian telecom services sector remains negative for 2013 considering increasing regulatory costs for incumbent and new operators. Uncertainty in regulations, which was the key credit risk in 2012, has been replaced by increasing costs which will impact most operators, including the incumbents over the short-to- medium term.
Several operators have shown interest in deploying several components of Cisco Quantum suite.
How Cisco Quantum Benefit Telecoms
Cisco Quantum Network Abstraction Suite provides a real-time network abstraction layer that provides network data collection and aggregation and orchestration to augment information in all decision processes.
Cisco Quantum Policy Suite provides a next-generation policy management solution to help service providers scale, control, monetize, and personalize any service on any type of network.
Cisco Quantum Analytics Suite enables telecom operators to benefit from business and network analytics capabilities that can enable both historical trend and real-time predictive policy decisions.
Service provider mobile investment is shifting away from Macrocell-only networks to heterogeneous networks (macro and small cells such as Wi-Fi, 3G, or LTE.).
Cisco Quantum RAN Optimization Suite addresses this pressing need, allowing service providers to maintain control, and benefit with major network investment savings for both operating and capital expenditures.
“We are seeing traction for various suites, here in India. We are working on a few pilots and are also at various stages of conversations with SPs for many of our suites,” Neeraj Arora, director, IBSG Cisco India and SAARC, told TelecomLead.com.
New Revenue Streams for Mobile Operators
Telecom operators are in the process of identifying and enhancing new monetization opportunities, targeted ads, personalization of services, capturing opportunities in M2M, more location based awareness, context awareness.
India Rating, a Fitch group company, says it expects telecoms to now focus on other growth levers like higher mobile data services adoption (about 5 percent of revenue), value-added services, tariff hikes, among others. Higher mobile data services adoption will be driven by the availability of compatible mobile devices, affordable data plans and rapidly rising internet users.
Cisco’s Neeraj Arora says optimization of network enables real time network collection, aggregation and orchestration of information to make a proper decision.
Telecoms’ focus in the next one or two years
Telecoms will focus on greater monetization from existing subscriber set. This will be immense in the urban markets.
Cisco Quantum will be significant as SPs are focusing on enhancing penetration in Tier 2 and 3.
Telecoms are focusing on enterprise data, one major area where most SPs are focusing on growth – Enterprise Cloud, Mobility cloud.
Since traffic is increasing 30 times in a few months, SPs are looking for more opportunities. Cisco offers capabilities from the point of view of video, consumer cloud platform, intelligence, Quantum Suite.
India Ratings expects that higher adoption of data services will be the next growth driver for telecoms. As the voice market is maturing, telecoms will shift their focus on data services, along with value-added services. As per industry estimates, there were 137 million internet users and only 23 million internet subscribers in the country at end-June 2012, as per TRAI data. The number of Internet users are likely to double over the next two three years, most of which will be on the mobile platform.
The Cisco Quantum solution allows for increased service velocity, quickly facilitating multiple service scenarios, while also providing a platform for application developers to take full advantage of the network.
In addition, the solution focuses on simple access to, and correlation of, intelligence from various points of the network for better monetization and optimization, and enhanced subscriber experience as a result.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
