MUMBAI: After having paid close to $16 billion in license fees, the telecom industry in India needs to invest a further $6-8 billion in capital expenditure to launch 3G.
Frost and Sullivan expects the Indian 3G market to have the potential for 80 million subscribers within three years of launch.
The key to make 3G services impactful and adopted by 80 million subscribers would be to generate revenues from advanced services like mobile data, video, and other transformative services.
Conventional solutions are prohibitively expensive and do not scale well because they require building a separate infrastructure for each new service. The challenges exist in two key areas for mobile network operators. First is to support both increased subscriber numbers and the explosion in new services, which will need an upgrade in their core infrastructure to the industry’s new architectural framework for delivering Internet Protocol (IP) multimedia services over mobile networks - IMS. Secondly, mobile network operators need to respond to the demand for rich multimedia content and exploit emerging business opportunities associated with it.
Frost and Sullivan director, ICT Practice APac Jayesh Easwaramony says, “Worldwide, we are in phase 2 of 3G, where the technology is mature, cost per bit has come down, and the smartphone revolution has increased the data revenues of operators globally. India is entering phase 2 of its 3G market evolution, where it is moving from the subscriber acquisition to subscriber retention mode. The combination of these two phases means that Indian operators would do in the next 10 months what the world did over 10 years. They have to make the data strategy work by combining operational best practices and India-specific innovation to justify the business case.”
Frost Sullivan and F5 Networks, which is an application delivery solution provider, presented a two-city Executive MindXchange titled Innovation and Transformation – The Road Ahead for Next-Generation Mobile Operators in India in Delhi and Mumbai. This MindXchange aimed to create a platform to discover how one can protect their existing infrastructure investments, enjoy sustainable cost savings, and while at the same time optimise the delivery of profitable new services.
F5 networks director of systems engineering, Asean and India Lim Chin Keng says, “Overcoming challenges from increasing multimedia services and on-demand content, mobile operators require intelligence in managing context and services. The aim of F5’s Intelligent Service Controller is to empower operators with the needed capabilities and versatility to rapidly create, adapt, scale, and manage new services to enforce more effective policies and satisfy changing subscriber demands. The revenue opportunities from speed and flexibility of delivering new services to groups of subscribers; their improved service quality and experience are certainly worth pondering.”
