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The Indian telecom sector is witnessing a phenomenal growth. The sector has emerged as the fastest growing telecom market in the world, with the addition of over 7 mn subscribers every month. And with the current subscriber base of over 220 mn, the half-a-billion mark is expected to be achieved by 2010. This unprecedented growth has led to a race among telecom companies to gain competitive edge by coming up with state-of-the-art, world-class infrastructure at globally competitive tariffs and reducing the digital divide by extending connectivity to unconnected areas.

As the present teledensity is approximately 20% and the industry aims to reach close to 50-60%, comprehensive expansion roadmaps have been worked out. The industry is also striving to reach out to rural and remote areas of the country.

The key market trend in the power management industry in the context of telecom applications is energy efficient products and solutions to help operators reduce their operating expenses drastically, to address the economic viability issue on one hand and environmental concerns on the other.

As an integral and critical part of telecom infrastructure, power management is gearing up to meet this spur in demand and keep pace with the industry. Growth in the telecom power management space in India has been approximately 30% in 2007-08 and is expected to be at similar levels during 2008-09.

All key power management industry players are also trying to meet the end customer's expectations and market trends by providing very innovative solutions, with compact and modular size, high efficiency, and high reliability. Customized products for rural India infrastructure are being developed with lower-cost equipment solutions with ever-increasing bandwidth.

Technology and Focus
Mobile service providers are already looking beyond the presently available power sources, realizing the fact that any investments done on long-term power requirements will reduce the cost of operation in the future.

Many service providers have installed inverters, from 3 KVA to 20 KVA, having single-phase and three-phase output ratings, compliant with stringent requirement of EMI/EMC interferences required in telecom operations. These inverters work with 48 VDC input and have high DC-to-AC conversion efficiency.

Also, air conditioning systems and large-scale power protection for central offices and network switching centers, and surge protection systems for complete protection from power spikes have become the need of the hour.

The SMPS technology has been the trend for the last few years. But the core focus is on making products more cost effective with no compromise on quality or reliability. Enhancing product efficiency is another core focus to reduce operational costs.

Size, thermal management, cost, and electrical performance (regulation, transient response, and noise generation) are the factors driving power management.

The best suited technologies for the Indian telecom market are those that can be deployed profitably for providing telecom services in rural and remote areas; for example, BTSes sharable by multiple service providers, smart antennas, new broadband technologies, broadband over power lines, new versions of customer premises equipment, battery, and power plant equipment, especially designed for rural areas. These new technologies and products hold the promise of rendering services in rural and remote areas in a cheaper, better, and faster way.

Modular DC power systems are picking up to provide scalability. Technologies like surge protection devices and high-density cooling are in the pipeline for the telecom market. Products with features like 3G series, telecom grade AC/DC rectifiers, higher efficiency product, higher energy density, and remote management will have a consistent demand in this industry.

Top Trends
Though the telecom infrastructure market is still in a growing phase, the sharing of infrastructure means that at a given point of time, the growth will plateau out.

For new telecom companies, infrastructure sharing will mean not just a faster rollout but also saving of billions of dollars. But for vendors of telecom infrastructure, this does not bode well.

The trend toward moving into shared infrastructure leads to the creation of passive infrastructure companies, which would build, operate, and lease these to service providers. Lower power needs of the telecom equipment further impact the product requirements wherein lower rating products are needed to meet telecom power requirements. The additional power needed to share the infrastructure would partly compensate for this.

Current trends in power management show that businesses are going for integrated solutions than point products. They prefer scalable and modular deployments and are interested in knowing load patterns. Therefore, power audits are in vogue before an appropriate power management solution is deployed. Businesses are also interested in knowing the power environment in which their mission-critical applications will run or are running.

Power management is moving out from the administration manager's role and is becoming more of an IT function or an MIS responsibility, and the CIO/CTO is accountable for it. Also, power management policies are being defined and implemented largely within the disaster management roadmap. Even the smallest telecom companies are demanding power management systems up to 100 KVA, as their backup needs are between 1-4 hours.

On the designing front, power conditioning and management products are being designed with higher wattage per cubic inch due to the steep increase in property prices.

Rack-mountable products are in demand due to the ease of management and space saving they offer. The UPS has become more intelligent as it is now equipped with multiple network management protocols for the network is going global (and therefore heterogeneous) and is being managed from remote locations, and more diagnostic and failure prediction features are being added to the UPS Sine-wave technology.

As far as battery is concerned, large battery banks for longer power failures are being maintained and swappable batteries are being preferred for they don't require any system shutdown or disruption in supply.

Demand Drivers
The criticality of network uptime is fueling the demand for enhanced power management solutions among telecom, data centers, and switching centers in the country. If power outages are not managed proactively, they would result in downtimes, which can be fatal to the business, especially when revenues depend entirely on service availability, as is the case with telecom companies.

Data centers have high-density requirements like deployment of blade servers and server consolidation, which further fuel the demand for proper power conditioning and management. Besides, IT equipment being used in data centers are increasingly getting more sophisticated by the day. Moreover, in addition to data centers and switching centers, base stations also require power management. Base stations require backup for network supply to the geographic area they serve.

Even the customer care and billing centers of telecom companies require efficient power management. We do have poor power infrastructure, and irregular supplies are nothing new. Therefore, redundancy is the key factor fuelling the growth of the power management market in the country.

Big Challenges
Though the government sector is taking a lead in the growth of telecom power requirements, they should primarily look at doing away with the L1 bidding process and focus more on quality products, new technologies, high efficiency, and low total cost of ownership. This will improve their infrastructure and reduce opex costs in the long run.

Dropping tariffs in the telecom industry is also a big challenge. This puts a lot of pressure on power management players to reduce power system costs and also requires a tactical approach to survive without going negative. Another challenge is that a lot of consolidation is going on in the telecom industry, creating the demand for frequent changes at the corporate level, which needs to be handled carefully; otherwise, it will affect the performance of the organization.

Also, the current costs of non-conventional power solutions-solar, wind, fuel cells-and a lack of distribution network for both conventional and non-conventional power for deployment in remote areas are acting as roadblocks. On the capex front, the challenge is to have products and solutions that are either low on capex or are with the paybacks of less than a year, if higher capex is unavoidable.

A number of opportunities exist in the power management market due to a huge gap in teledensity. Cost effectiveness of the solution and timely delivery schedules will drive the competitiveness among industry players. So, players should gear up to produce reliable and high-quality products in huge quantities to meet industry demands.

Sandeep Budki
sandeepb@cybermedia.co.in