Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Akanksha Singh, Thursday, August 05, 2010 | Voice&Data
Indian telecom has gone beyond borders. It has set global benchmark on business optimization and offered low
cost models, while adding millions of customers every month. But home grown telecos', both operators and
telecom equipment makers including VAS players are yet to take up innovation as their main thrust. They lack
direction, R&D budget, innovative approach and execution abilities. Their main bottleneck is their R&D budget
which is not enough to address the market potential. Most of the innovations collapse during the initial phase itself.
Global telecom companies have taken the lead. They are going head over heals for newer innovations in handsets,
in wireless technology and in services time and again for users. Indian companies are developing new technologies
and services but these innovations are facing difficulties to reach the market.
Major telecom giants like Ericsson, Alcatel‐Lucent, Samsung, Nokia, Vodafone and other global players keep their
annual budget for research and development considerable enough to bring out telecom innovations for
applications. IT firms such as Cisco, IBM and HP, chip companies like Qualcomm and Intel have earmarked
substantial funds for telecom innovation.
Last year's annual budget of global telecom players speaks out for themselves. What is interesting to note is that
whatever innovations and latest developments we see in telecom industry in India these days are through these
global players who introduces them to Indian consumers. Indian companies in this regard are a step behind.
Indian telcos talk R&D in few hundred crore of rupees. Research and development department has always been on
the loose end for the companies when it comes to allotting budget for technical innovations in India. KR Naik,
executive chairman, DIGILINK, says that the main thing lacking in R&D is volume – the economies of scale are just
not present, and thus the R&D spend becomes very high, with insufficient turnover. “We are currently working with
outside partners who supply in large volumes to several companies. Moreover, there are a lot of small companies
which exclusively handle R&D. R&D should work for multiple customers to spread cost and investment – not just in
the Indian market, but for the global market as well. For active products, there is a big market, but for passive
products, there are only six players in India today.” What is best practiced is the instant adoption of global
practices. Vivekanand Venugopal, VP & GM, Hitachi Data Systems India, says telecom innovation has taken a back
seat in India. “We have not seen any innovative VAS service in the country. But with 3G and BWA coming in,
operators will be looking at innovative services. So far, telecos focused on launching the network and voice
business. Next generation services will prompt operators and equipment vendors to look for innovation. The
government can also play a larger role in promotion telecom R&D.”
© Tech Mahindra Limited 2010
However, we cannot deny that many companies are doing their bit to bring out new and innovative deals and
services for users locally these days. With 300 million telephone subscribers today, India boasts of having the
second largest telecom network in the world after China. The country is adding some 8.5 million to 10 million new
mobile subscribers to the network every month to also emerge as one of the fastest growing telecom markets in
the world. So, market no doubt is growing by leaps and bounds for Indian telcos and innovations are part and
parcel of these developments.
Even though the time and budget has always been biggest constraints for researchers in telecom industry, telecos
are coming up with new and exciting innovations which can be watched out by global companies in next couple of
years. We are trying to analyse few of the innovations showcased at the recent Aegis Graham Bell Award
nominations meet.
mKrishi
TCS for its new business opportunities in rural market has come up with mKrishi (Mobile Krishi or Mobile
Agriculture) to facilitate the rapid adoption of mobile phones in rural India. mKrishi offers personalized and
integrated services specifically for farmers by combining multiple technologies such as cellular networks, mid‐range
mobile handsets, weather and soil sensor technologies to bring vital information regarding local weather, fertilizer
requirement based on soil conditions, pest control, and current food grain prices in local markets in a rich content
format to the farmer's low‐end mobile handsets. mKrishi also gives facility to farmers for sending crop images to
the experts for analysis. Recently TCS demonstrated the effectiveness of mKrishi in the procurement of pulses in
Tamil Nadu, India.
This innovative method was realized by TCS for farmers who today require personalized services regarding farming
as well as poultry, cattle, micro credit, crop insurance and government policies and mKrishi was conceptualized
keeping these in mind.
This is the first time that such specialized and personalized service for farmers has come up which in coming years
can bring in huge revenue generation from rural India.
© Tech Mahindra Limited 2010
Mobile Couponing
Mobile couponing is getting fancy of marketers, who are accountable to track and measure campaign effectiveness
and justify ROI of campaign. CanvasM has introduced an innovative mobile couponing solution to address the key
challenge around mobile coupon value chain participants by simplifying complexities to present highly
differentiating features in a user friendly manner. The solution offers multiple benefits for the retail consumer base
which is expected to generate and line up loyalty based and non loyalty based consumers.
Mobile Couponing brings in benefits of personalization with its unique feature of providing enhanced user
experience‐making it paperless with the Go Green factor; an easy access to information and latest offers while on‐
the‐move, search feature for appropriate coupons/offers with reminders; ready to access information and coupons
for redemption at point of sale with one barcode image (card) on handset which can either be saved on handset or
retrieved through GPRS/SMS whenever required; keeping the complete purchase record for any future validation
and budget verifications and planning.
According to Juniper research, mobile coupon technology is expected to reach 300 mn redemption worldwide by
2014 principally in developed markets with the apps revolution triggering the growth of new mobile coupon
service. The retail redemption values of the mobile coupons are expected to be $6 bn globally.
Clever Texting technology
India is home to more than 600 mn mobile phone users and many of these users don't know English, hence texting
becomes a challenge for them.
Luna Ergonomics has developed the first dictionary less statistical predictive texting technology which uses a
dynamic allocation of keys and hence does not rely on printed keys on the keypad. This offers the possibility of
supporting multiple languages on the same keypad.
The technology places characters to positions comfortable to the texting thumb by predicting from the statistical
nature of a particular language mined from large amounts of text corpuses. Also this is single key press typing.
CleverTexting has been developed for all the major languages of the world.
The technology offers immense opportunities. For operators and VAS players, the usability makes it possible for
people to send SMS in regional languages particularly when the focus of Indian operators is expansion in rural
markets.
The Panini Keypad also offers a usability to type in Indian languages easily on the web and on the PC to fill forms in
Indian languages or to chat and other applications. Licensing costs have been kept low and affordable considering
the value that is delivered to the user and its desirability. According to the company, SMS compression increases
the payload of the Indian language SMS from 70 characters per SMS to about 200.
Customer Experience Index
In the wake of a fiercely heated landscape of telecom marked by constant high churn, tariff wars and the
imminence of mobile number portability; the Indian mobile telephony industry has never been in greater need of
tangible index for customer experience. Customer experience which may be defined as the sum of all the touch‐
point interactions (direct/indirect) that the customer has with the service provider is undoubtedly the best
indicator of a service provider's performance.
Amdocs' Customer Experience Index is a first of its kind initiative in association with Symbiosis Institute of
Management Studies (SIMS) to provide the Indian telecom industry with a rating of service provider offerings based
on end user feedback on all marketing and technology touch points.
© Tech Mahindra Limited 2010
The Index provides the service provider and industry with a panoramic view of performance across parameters
ranging across the product lifecycle covering four major areas‐service awareness, service initiation, in‐service
experience and service termination.
This undertaking is an attempt to take the Indian telecom industry's ongoing innovation practices to greater heights
by weaving in customer experience tangibility and consequent enhancement a part of its bigger success.
Voice&Data Opinion
Create Rs 10,000 crore Innovation Fund India lacks innovation. Ratan Tata, who brought out Nano car, may be an
exception. To improve innovation in telecom, Indian government should encourage buying of locally made goods.
This can be done through offering incentives to buyers. Also, MNCs should set up manufacturing base in India
before they can sell any single chip / equipment. It should be a pre‐condition when we approve FDI. This will ensure
the setting up of telecom equipment manufacturing in India. Indian telcos – Bharti Airtel, Reliance
Communications, Tata Teleservices, Reliance Industries, etc. should increase R&D budget. Thanks to the emergence
of managed services, they are becoming marketing companies in India selling services. Why can not India spend a
part of the money received from 3G/BWA spectrum auction to create a Rs 10,000 crore innovation fund? This will
give enough moolah for aspiring innovators
Zero Opex Solar BTS
VNL, a part of the Shyam Telecom group, has developed a zero‐opex solar‐powered GSM base station for use in
rural areas. The GSM based network designed for rural areas supports as low as 150 subscribers and can go up to
15,000 subscribers. The equipment consumes less power. It is also fully compatible with technologies such as GPRS
and CAMEL. The product is also compact in size with mobile switching center, base station in a single cabinet. (The
VNL innovation was not part of Aegis Graham Bell awards)
FLYPP
Today technology savvy consumers across the world have become ardent users of interactive mobile applications,
downloading over 1.35 bn instances in 2009 and this number is expected to grow to over 18 bn by 2014. Mobile
operators can meet the needs of users more effectively with a platform that provides a repository of applications,
an application storefront and third party partnerships for application programming. Flypp from Infosys is a white
labeled, ready‐to‐launch application platform for mobile operators to enable monetization through a portfolio of
ready‐to‐use experiential applications across more than 3,000 devices.
Flypp reduces operational risk and overheads for the mobile operator, while accelerating innovation. It increases
share of wallet per user and empowers users with a broad spectrum of ready‐to‐use experiential applications. The
application portfolio enables advanced user experience such as digital merchandising that further boosts the
revenue opportunities for operators.
On the other hand, Flypp provides independent software vendors, a viable and attractive channel to showcase and
monetize their proprietary applications across multiple geographies and service providers.
With Flypp, mobile users will have easy and user‐friendly means of discovering, buying and using applications on
their mobile through a variety of channels eg On‐device Portal (ODP), application store, on‐line, in‐store, etc. All
this will be available to users using handsets from any manufacturer.
OpenScape UC
While unified communications has grown rapidly over the past couple of years, it hasn't matched the exponential
growth of social networking applications, most notably Twitter on smart phones.
© Tech Mahindra Limited 2010
Developers at Siemens Enterprise Communications conceptualized Twitter functionality for the OpenScape Unified
Communications (UC) application on smart phones for their users while running in the Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) environment.
OpenScape can scan Twitter text and, when it spots words or other strings that have been set up as key words, it
can then perform one or more predetermined actions. Developers decided to leave the configuration process 'as
open as possible', so that people could structure their communication in a way that was natural to them opposed
to reflecting a CTO or other management mentality.
This is a strategic decision for Siemens as these functionalities will be part of their UC solution road map. This not
only will create the new business opportunities for the company but moreover be a revolution in the
communication.
Real‐Time Charging
Telcordia Real‐Time Charging and Policy has come up with an innovative differentiator that turns a charging system
into one of the most powerful differentiators for a Communication Service Providers (CSP).
Personalization is not just changing service delivery. It's also shaping expectations. Today, customers want voice,
data, video, and music on one device. They want to make VoIP calls while downloading messages. They want post‐
paid mobile service at work and prepaid during personal time. They want to put spending limits on their children's
mobile downloads and many more.
The Telcordia Real‐Time Charging solution has provided innovative charging services for Tata DOCOMO, Uninor and
Aircel in India and with other carriers worldwide. It is the technology that allowed India to be the first to launch
innovation services including per‐second billing and per‐character SMS billing.
The most important development in the Indian mobile telecommunications industry is undoubtedly the launch of
3G services in coming times. These mobile broadband services will change the way people live and not just the way
they use their mobile phones.
To mark their identities in this highly competitive industry, CSPs will be able to introduce differentiated services and
applications to attract new subscribers and retain existing subscribers by telecos.
The Indian telecom industry is no doubt on the rise, and innovations are being conceptualized and piloted.
However, mark of their reality can only be felt when they will actually be launched and accessed by consumers in
coming years. The path is chosen but still there are miles to go and with these innovations it surely seems that the
there is a silver lining to this dark cloud. India can not even think of an Indian Apple bringing out iPhone or iPad. We
are not considering a home grown 5G. China and Japan have their own definitions and technologies for 3G and 4G.
It's time for us to come out of woods and do better
© Tech Mahindra Limited 2010