Is India on your roadmap at all?
If you are a softswitch maker, you should be headed towards India right now. The carriers in India are expected to deploy softswitch equipment worth half a billion US dollars over the next five years. Here is a link to the report that I concluded today.
Carriers in India have already drawn up plans for deployment of more than 14.9 million Class 4 NGN ports and over 4.1 million Class 5 NGN lines, making it one of the top Nextgen Voice markets over the coming few years. In majority of the cases, vendors have already been finalized. The findings came as a major surprise while I was researching the subject. My impression was that VoIP in India was limited to certain small PC-to-Phone offerings only. I started my research some two months back with the intention of finding out why the carriers in India were not serious about NGN voice. I was proven wrong. There are tenders floating all around in the country.
An estimated volume of 1.23 million Class 4 softswitch and gateway ports have already been deployed for commercial use by carriers in India. ZTE is the most deployed platform commanding a market share of over 71%, followed by NSN and Alcatel-Lucent. ZTE maintains the number one share across the market if we consider the volume of equipment in all those projects where vendors have been selected for future deployments.
Among the carriers, BSNL and Tata Communications have implemented VoIP trunking networks relatively earlier. BSNL recently swung into action with two major tenders involving 6.4 million Class 4 and 1 million Class 5 NGN lines. BSNL’s lead in Nextgen Voice network deployment is equally reciprocated by large projects at Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices and Vodafone.
By 2012 the report projects 18.9 million Class 4 and 17.6 million Class 5 NGN lines to be deployed in carrier networks in India on a cumulative basis, which translates into a revenue opportunity to the tune of $498 million between now and the year 2012. This excludes allied Nextgen Voice Network solutions such as media servers, Session Border Controllers, and enhanced applications platforms.
Report: Carrier Nextgen Voice Networks in India. Published 8th December 2008.
