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Buying Tips

n RoI: This is the most important criterion of choosing any equipment and broadband equipments are no exception. The ability to provision a variety of service rapidly becomes a subset of RoI criterion.

n Speed of Deployment: It is important for the service providers to ensure that deployment is quick, so that it translates into a stable system with solutions that are readily marketable and things are not left to experimentations.

n Open Technology Platform: By avoiding proprietary boxes, operators are guaranteed to have products conforming to operational, maintenance, control and provisioning standards.

n Benchmarking: Testing of equipment before actually buying has become a norm across the world. There are independent testing organizations which do the product testing, besides specialized T&M companies like Agilent and Acterna who do it on behalf of the vendors. However, TEC also does testing before a product introduced in India.

n Capability to Add New Services: The flexibility of equipment to let the operators to add new services, over and above basic access services.

n Scalability: The ability of the service providers to scale up from a small investment to a large infrastructure with minimum impact on services availability is of obvious importance.

n Investment Protection: In an era of consolidation of services providers due to mergers and acquisition, it is important for the operator that his networking infrastructure gets a higher valuation through best asset value. This is possible only if the operator chooses equipment from reputed vendors who not only contribute and participate actively in the global standards forums but also develop and manufacture products conforming to global standards.

n Migration to Emerging Standards: Operator is more comfortable with product’s conformance to the industry standards so that his investment is protected. Also, the operator has to ensure that solution selected by him stands the test of time and is supported by an emerging technology migration path. This enables the service providers to grow network modularly.

n Standards: One should look for ITU-standard compliance both at the access as well as core level to ensure a guaranteed QoS delivery to the CPE when circuits are built across the network. This saves the operator from getting stuck to a particular vendor for CPEs.