The Indian telecom industry has evolved rapidly over the past few years. From transmission of voice packets to introduction of 3G capabilities, service providers need to upgrade systems urgently to keep up with the changes and build subscriber base. 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 & Sullivan expects the Indian 3G market to have the potential for 80 million subscribers within 3 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.

It is noted that 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.

According to Jayesh Easwaramony, Director, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, APAC, “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 a leading application delivery solution provider, F5 Networks, presented a two-city Executive MindXchange titled “Innovation and Transformation – The Road Ahead for Next-Generation Mobile Operators in India” on 14th and 15th July in Delhi and Mumbai, respectively. 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 optimize the delivery of profitable new services.

Mr. Lim Chin Keng, Director of systems engineering, ASEAN and India, F5 networks noted, “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.”

The key areas of discussion at the MindXchange were, How to Grow ARPU; Maximize ROI; Ensure Quality of Experience (QoE); Preserve Versatility, Service Provider Scale; IMS Migration; IPv4/IPv6 Co-existence; and Mobile Broadband Optimization. The audience at the event included CIO / CTO; Head of Technology / IT, Line of Business Owners, and Telecom Solution Architects across sectors. The media partners for the event were Communications Today and Voice&Data.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation, and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation, and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages over 45 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses, and the investment community from 40 offices across six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit http://www.frost.com

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), focused on ensuring the secure, reliable, and fast delivery of applications. F5’s flexible architectural framework enables community-driven innovation that helps organizations enhance IT agility and dynamically deliver services that generate true business value. F5’s vision of unified application and data delivery offers customers an unprecedented level of choice in how they deploy ADN solutions. It redefines the management of application, server, storage, and network resources, streamlining application delivery and reducing costs. Global enterprise organizations, service and cloud providers, and Web 2.0 content providers trust F5 to keep their business moving forward. For more information, go to www.f5.com.