Mike Aquino, SVP, Global Field Organization, Ciena Corporation speaks about leveraging the 3G market opportunity in India by helping mobile operators overcome capacity, efficiency and operational expenditure challenges
What was your role in enabling 3G services in India?
Ciena has grown its customer base in India by offering 3G service-enabling technologies for a large number of mobile service providers, empowering them to offer a wide range of advanced services with greater network capacity. We are currently working with Reliance on their launch of 3G services on a pan-India basis. We are helping them improve service economics by cost effectively increasing network capacity and network efficiency.
We plan to leverage the 3G market opportunity primarily by helping mobile operators overcome capacity, efficiency and operational expenditure challenges. With market-leading network aggregation and transmission solutions, Ciena uniquely enables mobile operators to implement the most economical, reliable and future-ready access networks. By working with Ciena, 3G operators may expect to achieve significant margin improvements and overall improvement in their return on investment.
3G is five months old in India, but customers are still facing trouble due to network disruptions and backhaul trouble. What can be done at this stage to solve the same, taking a cue from other successful 3G models globally?
With respect to 3G, in addition to pure capacity needs, we believe that operators are facing a critical challenge of making 3G profitable. As India takes its broadband revolution mobile, we are providing dramatic improvement in the service economics by drastically reducing the cost of backhauling data, and cost effectively improving the ability of backbone networks to scale in capacity. Thus, making 3G profitable for operators.
What is your latest offering in terms of intelligent software for the Asian market?
Asia Pacific, and specifically India, is a critical market for Ciena. Our product and services portfolio meets the critical next-generation network infrastructure needs of service providers and enterprises across the region. Our major areas of product and technology differentiation that we aim to bring the Asian market include Coherent 40G/100G for applications such as metro, long-haul and submarine transport, OTN and Packet switching combined with control plane software for mesh networking, resiliency, faster provisioning (time-to-market), and automated networking; and, Carrier Ethernet solutions for mobile backhaul and business Ethernet services.
Also, software is a critical underlying technology across our portfolio in those areas from network management to embedded intelligence for greater network automation.
How effective are high-capacity submarine networks in providing better connectivity between countries?
We work with network operators to deploy next-generation submarine architectures with innovative technologies that help them create and adopt more competitive business models from depreciated network infrastructure assets. Specifically, our solutions enable submarine network operators leverage their existing network assets to gain more bandwidth, higher-availability services, and differentiated customer-focused offerings.
How the intelligent, ultra-reliable backbone network can help operators in India with their 2G/3G/BWA networks?
We see these backbone networks being comprised of key technologies, including coherent 40/100G transport, OTN/packet switching, Carrier Ethernet and network automation. With those technologies we provide simplified network architecture that allows business to move faster. We automate complex networks with programmable optical and Ethernet platforms, intelligent software and strategic services to use the network for driving continuous growth through service and application innovation.
With that expertise and product offering, we can help network operators in India improve the profitability and reliability for their 2G/3G/BWA networks as well as help them launch advanced services to enterprises and upgrade capacity on submarine networks.
What do you see as the scope for 3G in India going forward? Please compare it with 3G experiences globally.
India has been at the forefront of mobile voice revolution and we fully expect India to be a leader in making 3G services available for mass consumption. We’ve been helping customers across the globe launch advanced wireless services, and enabling those networks with Carrier-Ethernet based wireless backhaul solutions and high-capacity optical transport and switching technologies for greater bandwidth and resilience. We look forward to bring that field-proven experience to our customers in India, and working with them on the next phase of 3G service offerings.
By Beryl M
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