India is moving closer to the NTP ’99 dream of achieving a teledensity of seven by the year 2005 and 15 by year 2010, from the present level of five. There has been a good growth on the wireless front but even wireline has grown pretty well. The basic services has grown by around 18 percent (in terms of number of subscribers) in FY 2002. It seems in India one will witness a higher growth on the wireless front now that we have two technologies, GSM as well as CDMA and both of them have a good reach in terms of number of circles.

Difference between DWDM and CWDM Feature DWDM CWDM Number of wavelengths 32 or more (C, L band) 4/8/16 (O, S, E, S, C, L band) Channel spacing 50/100/200 GHz (0.4/0.8/1.6 nm) 2,500 GHz (20 nm) Channel capacity Up to 10G Up to 2.5G Power balancing Yes No Laser type Cooled DFB Uncooled DFB Cooling requirement Yes No Filter technology Thin film (large number of layers), AWG, Bragg grating Thin film (few number of layer) Span distances 640 km (with nodes at longer distances) 80 km (with nodes at shorter distances) Cost effectiveness Very expensive Cheaper by 50 percent Applications High capacity long haul Backbone, metro core and regional transmission networks Metropolitan access and enterprise networks

To realize that dream, all the telecom service providers as well as utility companies in India are deploying large scale OFC in the country for building the telecom infrastructure in the country. Most of the players have already deployed a major portion of their network and some of them have started rolling out OFC deployment to catch up with other service providers. Reliance is planning to deploy 60,000 km, Bharti is opting for 24,000 km, and VSNL is opting for 17,000 km. On the other hand in the utilities sector, PGCIL has plans for 15,000 km, and Railtel for 25,000 km. There is no doubt that, to deploy such massive infrastructure in the country, one expects an increased demand of optical transmission equipment and the demand will continue for couple of years.

The optical transmission market in India has been on an upswing with the placing of orders by private companies—Tata Teleservices and Reliance and utility companies—PGCIL, Railtel, and GAIL. It seems the upswing will continue to be there for a couple of years as presently all the companies are either augmenting their network or creating a nationwide infrastructure on which voice and data services will be deployed. It is difficult to forecast the optical transmission equipment market in India for FY 2002-03 as projects are under different stages. In some of the projects, the companies are still in the tender or RFP stage. In some cases, the orders have been finalized but not delivered and in some cases the orders have been delivered but still under implementation stage and there is a possibility that it might spill over in the next fiscal. So, there are all kinds of probabilities.

In FY 2002-03, the optical transmission equipment market in India is estimated to be in the range of Rs 750–800 crore and the growth has been estimated at around 7-14 percent. The above value does not include optical transmission equipment deployed by i2i submarine cable network connecting Chennai and Singapore. As most of the optical transmission projects run for 2–3 years we have tried to take only the fiscal figures in our estimation.

Nortel is currently the number one player. Even new entrants like Huawei and ZTE have done pretty well. All the major multinational players are present in the country either directly or indirectly. In terms of geographies, Nortel, Tellabs, and Sycamore represents the American continent; Alcatel, Marconi, and Siemens represents Europe whereas Huawei and ZTE represent Asia. Huawei is represented through HFCL, ZTE is represented through UTL and ARM, and Sycamore is represented through Tejas. Also in the space are Indian players like Fibcom, ITI and HTL, a HFCL Group company. The Indian players except Fibcom are mostly focussing on SDH technology whereas Nortel, Huawei, ZTE, Sycamore, Siemens, Alcatel, and Marconi are focussing on both SDH and DWDM technology.

The growth of transmission equipment in the country is dependent on growth of DELs, geographical spread of DELs, increase in Internet usage, increase in BPO/call center operations, increase in software development centers, percolation of e-governance to taluka level and others.

EXPERTS PANEL AM Gopalakrishnan, associate vice-president (technical) Fibcom India CS Rao, country manager and director (SAARC region), Tellabs Rajan Mehta, vice president, Nortel Networks India Ramdev Sharma, head (product marketing), Huawei Telecommunications India