Alcatel-Lucent is a key technology player in the Indian telecom market. The company is working closely with a number of operators to help them leverage IP routing and a host of transport technologies to monetise their networks.
In an interaction with tele.net.in, Drazen Lukic, vice-president, IP routing and transport Asia Pacific, Alcatel-Lucent shares his views on emerging technology trends in IP transport space, challenges associated with the adoption of software defined networking (SDN); and Alcatel-Lucent’s business strategy to tap opportunities offered by IP transport and SDN market.
Edited excerpts …
Is India at par with its global counterpart in technology adoption to accelerate network modernisation?
The economy of India is developing very fast, in the speed of China, if not faster. The population is also increasing fast which will create a robust foundation for more bandwidth. Service providers and sectors are building up 100G networks, with some looking at 100G plus super pipes. To deal with unexpected fibre cuts, the market also requires ultra-high network availability where control plane intelligence is a must to have.
What are the key trends that you foresee in the IP transport space in the Indian telecom market?
The seemingly insatiable demand for mobile, video and cloud-based services pressuring India’s networks shows no sign of slowing down — and bigger pipes and more capacity alone won’t relieve the burden. Telecom operators and sectors that don’t rebuild or retool to stay competitive and meet their financial performance expectations risk losing customers. Yet as bandwidth utilisation continues unabated, today’s high-speed, high-capacity 100G optical networks may not be adequate just a few years down the road. So what’s next? And more importantly, how do we get there - how do we build higher capacity? Telecom operators and the industry needs a scalable, versatile and dynamic networking solution that can adapt to the ever-changing needs of users in a cost-effective way. Tomorrow’s networks will have to provide the flexibility to drive down costs, the intelligence to easily add new services, and the agility to scale bandwidth where and when it is needed.
In what ways can operators achieve profitability and monetise their existing networks through Intelligent Control Plane solutions?
Lowering cost through higher networking efficiency is the way forward for the industry. With intelligence control plane, more network resources will be freed for data transmission, which reduces both operating expenditure and capital expenditure.
Improved revenue through transport as a service. With intelligence control plane, service providers can provide transport services with different service-level agreements. With SDN, service providers can create new business models by slicing their physical network into multiple virtual networks and outsourcing them.
What are the key operator concerns while opting for software define networking and data centre interconnect technologies?
For SDN, the key concern is on multiple vendor support. Alcatel-Lucent has developed a strategy that can erase this concern for both short term and long term. On short-term basis, we can either develop orchestrators or third party drivers; and in the long-term, we can rely on open standard interfaces.
Alcatel-Lucent addresses customer’s challenges in a comprehensive way. Rather than only addressing parts of issues, Alcatel-Lucent’s SDN solution (Network Service Platform or NSP) combines service automation with network optimisation. When creating a service, NSP can on real time basis check the network resources and select the best possible path based on policies; in other words, the service creation is network aware. When optimising a network, NSP can tune the network dynamically based on the service KPIs that is pre-set, in other ways, the network optimisation is service aware. Alcatel-Lucent’s NSP also plan to add service assurance capabilities so that the service running over the network can be monitored, reported and trouble-shoot.
For DCi, the customers have to deal with multiple issues including high capacity, low latency, encryption and multiple client service types. For synchronous synchronisation, DCi must provide ultra-low latency and ultra-high speed at the same time. For financial institutions or public sector, encryption is must-have to avoid data to be tapped. A few of the data centre operators will also require fibre channel or InfiniBand support so that these services can also be carried over DCi.
What is Alcatel-Lucent’s business strategy to tap growth opportunities offered by the India telecom industry in areas such as IP transport, SDN etc?
In 2015, we are promoting four key technologies to help India customers address concerns on scalability, efficiency and intelligence: