With businesses taking a 24/7 approach to working, efficient and intelligent networking has become an absolute necessity for the smooth functioning of any industry. And, mobility being the buzzword in today's communication arena- companies are gearing up to deploy integrated, wireless and convergent networks.

Today, highly flexible and sound networks are required for an infrastructure that will enable advanced, new services that mobile and fixed network operators are expected to offer in the future-while continuing to support all of today's existing services. Not just the industry's, the consumer's expectation from broadband services and 3G are also very high. Hence, service providers and equipment and platform manufacturers and vendors have to make sure that services live up to the hype.

Today's businesses, service providers and vendors are striving to make a mark within this expanding competitive landscape by searching for ways to brand and bundle new services, reduce operational costs, and strategically position themselves in relation to their competition. In this race to emerge as the most technically advanced, Next Generation Networks such as IP, VoIP, VPN etc offer accurate and efficient solutions.

What are your expectations from Next Generation Networks?

Vikram Srihari, global VP-IT, Opelin Laboratories They need to be robust and broadband. I believe that broadband has arrived in a big way after being in the shadows for a long time, and so it's this technology which will take us to the future. Whatever networks throw up should guarantee connectivity 24/7. This can be obtained only through a combination of many things such as Wi-Fi and broadband in terms of optical fibre. Moreover, we should be able to connect laptops, mobiles, PDAs; in other words, interoperability is the need of the hour. Next Generation Networks (NGNs) should guarantee connectivity, broadband and scalability almost like video on demand.

In the field of developing or deploying next gen networks we are still very young, as we started much later than the Western countries. So we didn't have to grapple with many issues that they had to, such as the various protocols that they have in their countries. In India we just have GSM which runs all over the country. As in CDMA, we are not even in generation 4 yet although we do have the complexity of WLL, which gives us a set kilometer of distance and mobility. IT and telecom are very convergent fields and the point is to use IT as an enabler to maintain high level of connectivity at a very high bandwidth, as that's the order of the day. Another important requirement is that redundancy has to be maintained at all costs-if one avenue of communication is unable to connect us, we should have an alternate medium to be able to do so.

Sunil Kapoor, CIO, Fortis Healthcare The next generation networks have to be dependable and wireless. Dependability means having 5 9s of uptime, ping time which are workable on some applications. It also means reaching not only the metros but also the smaller towns and cities. For dependability we can also include security and secure networks, and the SLA we have with respect to uptime. By wireless it would mean that we are able to connect anything, anywhere. Wi-Fi has come into computers, and similar technology can be developed for mobiles, be it for commercial purposes or personal. We should move forward from requiring a hotspot to accessing a Wi-Fi zone-why can't it be like the air card is? For example, VoIP should go on wireless without any requirement of a wire or a cable. Speed on Wi-Fi has to increase. Wi-Fi on the LAN itself has to go up; it's still limited, as we cannot do high-end graphics on it.

Anil Porter, head-IT and Telecom, Galileo India There are a lot of networks which are gaining popularity today. There's VPN. There has been lot of VPN deployment and VPN, as a technology, has really started mushrooming. Another network creating a buzz is MPLS. Everybody is upgrading to become MPLS-compatible. At the end of the day what matters to the user is that he should be able to use that network to maximum comfort. So the important thing for next generation networks, or whichever future technology we talk about, is security-that it is integrated with other networks and is secure; there are no trojans or worms running around in the network, choking your throughput. Once we have taken care of all this, irrespective of what protocol the application is using, it should be able to provide a good integrated platform. Integration right now is a humongous task. Thus, the future network should evolve in such a way that it gives you comfort of integration, of a discreet stand-alone application. Networks need to act like a media; application overheads need to be reduced and integration issues need to be made easier. Future networks should have high uptime up to the last mile. A lot of improvement needs to be done in the infrastructure alone.

There would be a lot of cross value-added products associated with NGNs. For example, smart cards, blue tooth-which is still insecure but might evolve into NGN if its range can be expanded. Cost of networks need to come down further. They have to be dependable, in terms of uptime to the last mile. Telcos have brought in fibre to the building structure but it's on ring architecture and more than a single damage to it will leave us in the cold.

Wireless will evolve in terms of higher and higher throughputs with lot of security built into it in terms of access. On the basic networks such as telecom networks the futuristic aspects need to be addressed very extensively. Apart from being MPLS, lot many applications should run on the same network.

Akhil Pandey, head-IT, NDPL Networks that we are deploying are in themselves proving to be Next Generation as we are connecting 152 collection centers, and for the first time the distribution management would be fully computerized. As we are into power distribution networks, our model is consumer centric and we need to meet the expectations of the consumer so we require very high degree of network availability and very fast networks. Reaction time needs to be in milliseconds. The network needs to reliable, with speed and accuracy. It should also guarantee confidentiality of data. It should be scalable and changeable, where performance monitoring can be done.

Raman Bansal, chief Systems manager, CRIS NGNs need to cater to all types of multimedia applications. By multimedia I mean multiple medium of contact, data applications, real-time applications, or video conferencing. They need to be integrated with end user business applications in the high way, and also put in an interface with business applications. They need to provide freedom of choosing from various service providers, choosing the types of services we want and are offered by various service providers, and the freedom to do all this on the fly. For this we need real time online identification and authorization functions to be in place. Mobility has to be maintained irrespective of the location of the user. Uptime reliability and security are common issues, so it's assumed that they are taken care of in the next generation networks. In fact, a better parameter to describe the requirements would be desired quality of service. Everybody from NGN should accept that he should be able to have multiple types of media such as real-time voice, music, video data services, etc. Such services have to be supported on a unified network because these applications have inherently different characteristics so an appropriate quality of service is required to be provided by the networks in order to support these services. Quality of service parameters are availability of bandwidth, delay on the network, the delay variation that we know by the name of jitter, packet loss. These are the four parameters used to mathematically define quality of service. Next Generation Networks must be able to address these requirements most comprehensively.

What challenges do you expect to face?

Sunil Kapoor The challenges while deploying NGNs is to assure dependability in terms of uptime and reach, proper availability and bandwidth with the price attached to it. Infrastructure to deploy networks and last mile connectivity is not available in the metros. Technology is not an issue, whereas a weak infrastructure causes problems related to dependability, availability and reach. Security would be a challenge everywhere and it's a continuous battle; we can't solve it by fighting a small war.

Anil Porter The biggest challenge will be the cost incurred. We will have to upgrade our CPE, switches and routers. Another major concern will be the effect they will have on existing networks; will they take the legacy forward and be compatible? Cost also depends on how the network equipment price will behave-will it be high or low, or can the same equipment be used. Deploying NGNs will be a challenge if they require drastic change. NGNs will be able to address the issues of security and storage successfully. They will have to go beyond L3 to give the comfort factor to service providers. They have to think about giving more business security than operation.

Akhil Pandey The technology, that is all the routers and switches, have to be imported, thus the cost incurred is high. Getting the right kind of technology is also another challenge as the technology is changing at a very fast pace. Availability of the right kind of technical expertise, the right kind of trained professionals to work on and maintain the networks, forces us to outsource work. Security, on the other hand, is a known devil and there are ways and means to deal with it.

Vikram Srihari The challenges that we'll face would be from the business point of view. That is to convince businesses to invest in next gen networks. Because technological advancements are happening at a very fast pace, making long-term plans is practically impossible. Thus, choosing a network and deploying it is a challenging task in itself. Security is another major cause for concern because when we talk about Wi-Fi leakage, it is a very critical problem-it's just like tapping a phone, but in a wireless network. Hence, provisions have to be made to provide adequately secure networks, and also to deal with access and control issues which emerge with deployment of next generation networks.

Raman Bansal Challenges are directly related to user expectations that would require the mix of various services on next gen networks. This is easier said than done. We do have some enabling technologies in place to provision all these technologies on a single network but a lot of this is yet to be achieved. For example, support of session initiation protocol (SIP) on mobile networks is yet to be done, especially when we talk of mobile networks; availability of bandwidth is itself an issue; GPRS within 2.5 g is also not available. When we limit our vision to our country these are the challenges.

Sonia Sharma

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