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The wireless world is accelerating. 3G is quickly moving to 3.5G, 3.9G, and 4G, and is changing the way the world communicates. The evolution of wireless technologies, including WiMax, CDMA2000, GPRS, EGPRS, WCDMA, HSDPA, and 1xEV, allows the development of new wireless devices that combine voice, Internet, and multimedia services.

Globally, technology is headed towards adding value to products to provide analytical powers to measurements and not just carrying out a measurement. This means more use of embedded electronics and software. Products are becoming smaller because of nano-technologies. Better semiconductor devices are available that can allow flexibility to designers to pack more and more functions in the same product.

Hardware is becoming simple and more brain is being put in the programming of semiconductors inside T&M products. This could mean that products such as synthetic instruments and LXI-enabled instruments would become trendsetters in the years to come.

Operators are gradually upgrading from the present network-based operational support system (OSS) solutions to newer OSS solutions focusing on service and customer management.

This is essential to ensure that the revenue earning services are always up and running, and high-value corporate customers are getting the right service levels. Also, corporate customers demand adherence to SLAs, and OSS solutions should be capable of identifying SLA violations, if any.

Service providers are challenged to reduce cost and increase revenue while simultaneously attracting and retaining profitable customers. This calls for efficiency and automation.

The entire service provider community is facing these challenges posed by an unprecedented growth in subscribers, traffic volumes, and the inability to maintain QoS. Planned mobile number portability (MNP) will add more challenges to service providers to retain customers.

As voice calls are becoming cheaper, operators need to look into VAS for generating additional revenues to offset the drop in revenue. T&M players are excited about wireless technologies such as CDMA, 1xEVDO, GSM, UMTS, WiMax, and Wi-Fi, and they feel new technologies which are in the pipeline, including mobile WiMax (802.16e), IPTV, UMTS and, LTE, could make a difference.

Technologies prevailing in the Indian market are 2G, 3G, and WiMax, and for these technologies, most chip-set designers, protocol stack developers, and telecom manufacturers are increasing their RF test capabilities in India.

The T&M sector expects major telecom companies as well as the Department of Telecommunication to open test houses in the near future for catering to the needs of conformance testing on telecom products being developed in India. This has already happened in other telecom ripe countries/regions like China, Taiwan, Japan, Europe, and the US.

Existing and new R&D centers offer good business opportunities for protocol and RF in upcoming wireless technologies. As the deployment of WiMax services begins, coverage measurement tools and network installation equipment will be in high demand in India.

Low-cost mobile phones, base stations mainly for 2G, customer premises equipment (CPE) for WiMax for 802.16e, fixed wireless telephones for GSM and CDMA, and GSM repeaters and subassemblies would be the main telecom products that we expect to be produced in India in large volumes. The production segment will, therefore, give good business opportunities to the T&M industry.

Telecom expansion continues to be the largest driver for growth in the T&M industry, as this segment is growing day-by-day.

Besides network expansion, India has emerged as one of the leading hubs for R&D and design bases for multinationals, which invest a lot in T&M equipment for their activities, especially in upcoming technologies.

Emerging Areas
Widespread deployment of WiMax is expected in the coming years, driven by its ability to deliver a low-cost, flexible, and high-performance solution to “last mile” broadband Internet services. Some analysts believe that due to its advantages, WiMax is destined to become the third most widely used high-speed Internet access technology, following its two key competitors-digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable modem.

Agilent Technologies first came to the market with a WiMax-based solution in November 2004 and quickly established itself in the WiMax space.

The Agilent Signal Studio for 802.16 OFDMA and 802.16-2004 software provides R&D engineers with the flexibility to quickly and easily configure fixed and mobile WiMax-compliant waveforms for both component and receiver design verification and testing.

Agilent's ESG vector signal generator incorporates a broad array of capabilities for evaluating the performance of nearly all existing and proposed air interface standards such as WiMax. Together with Signal Studio software, it provides pre-configured and user-configurable WiMax waveforms that developers can use to stimulate their WiMax components at frequencies of 6 GHz.

The standards, devices, and emerging mobile radio applications pose several challenges to T&M vendors. It is not enough to keep fingers on the pulse of the current market, cooperating with other companies to detect the latest trends early on, and develop new standards and applications accordingly is equally important. Numerous challenges exist in the area of microwave technology, full-coverage digital TV, and 'video goes mobile', where Rohde & Schwarz considers itself to be a specialist. In the telecom sector, the expected emerging areas in India would be:

• Protocol stack development in all layers
• Application feature testing for 2G and 3G mobile stations and base stations
• Development and testing of customer premises equipment and base stations
• Pre-conformance protocol testing and RF conformance testing
• Production of high-end 2G, 3G BTS, mobile phones and other telecom products

Never before has the need for new wireless and communication standards been so prevalent. While chip manufacturers are working to pack as much functionality into their latest chipsets as possible, device manufacturers are scrambling to implement this new functionality into their latest products and test these devices.

To combat this accelerated product development cycle, a flexible, software-based architecture is essential to rapidly prototype, design, and test devices using current and emerging wireless and communication technologies.

By using NI software-defined modular instruments, one can maximize equipment investment by creating a test system that is both reusable and adaptable to changes in test device.

National Instruments offers a suite of modular instruments, including digital I/O, precision DC, audio analyzers, and switches, so one can build a comprehensive communications device test system with virtual instrumentation approach.

Anticipating market need for standardization, Rohde & Schwarz have already, about four years ago, installed automatic calibration system for RF and microwave instruments at their centralized repair and calibration lab at Bangalore.

By March 2008, the company will further equip its calibration lab at Bangalore with two more universal calibration systems. This will help its customers to get their equipment calibrated with very short turnaround time. Rohde & Schwarz develops complete T&M equipment solutions in upcoming technologies like 3G, Wimax, HSPA, LTE, and IPTV.

Agilent ensures that design and test tools are ready when the market needs them-it helps clear the way so developers can take 3GPP LTE and mobile WiMax forward. The Agilent E6651A mobile WiMax Test Set incorporates flexible base station emulation, IP traffic support and a unique ability to make on-board RF parametric measurements in an integrated unit. In contrast to other commercially available solutions, no external equipment is required to measure UL signals. The E6615A's Wave 2 enhancements include support for DL, STC, SM, and UL collaborative MIMO measurements.

Behind China
There is a boom in the expansion of telecom networks and a lot of R&D activities are now happening in India. However, the effect of this telecom boom is hardly visible on indigenous production of network items or mobile phones.

Considering the current rate of increase in cellular subscriber base-about 7 mn additions per month-and the needs of the replacement market, the annual demand for mobiles phones currently in India should be arund 100 mn devices. However, the present production capacity in India is just about 50 mn phones per year. This gap of over 50 mn phones is bridged by imports from China, Korea, Europe, and the US.

China, on the contrary, is currently producing about 500 mn phones/year against their actual production capacity of over 800 mn phones. More than 60% of the local production is exported from China, whereas the Indian telecom production houses have yet to begin export of any significant share of their local produce to other countries.

There are several large and small Chinese manufactures like Huawei, ZTE, and Bird, which came up in the last decade and made their presence felt very strongly in the global telecom industry.

Unfortunately, none of the Indian telecom manufacturing companies could come up to compete in the global arena. On the technology front also India has not made any considerable impact. Core-DECT remains to be the only indigenously developed technology and there are very few takers of this technology even within India.

Local research and development and production not only generates more employment in any country but also gives boost to several other related industries. India is far behind China in all these aspects.