n Promising Market: The market for T&M has been active and promising. The total market is estimated to be about Rs 250-275 crore by March this year. It is not just the communications sector that has been attractive, the broadcast and education markets too have been aggressive. Moreover, there has been sale to the defense and PSUs too.

n Telco Ramp-up: Traditionally, BSNL and MTNL were the big buyers. But others are moving in fast. There has been increased activity in the private sector both on the GSM and CDMA front. The two largest corporate houses in India, Tata and Reliance, rolled out their services. Others like Bharti, BSNL, and Hutch have consolidated and announced new launches. Overall, telecom services, be it the basic, cellular, broadband, DLD, or ILD, are growing. Market estimates suggest that Reliance must be investing about $15–20 million on test, monitoring, and management. Bharti’s investment is estimated to be about $5 million and that of Tatas around $3 million.

n QoS Drive: The focus of operators is and will be on customer acquisition and high-definition services. This means each of them is using the latest in technology like SDH or SDH over DWDM or DWDM or TDMA/IP or CDMA 2000 1X or GPRS. The investment is coming in T&M to support quality networks, network operating centres, and central processing offices. Service providers are realizing that they cannot perform without T&M solutions.

n Defense, Broadcast Big Buyers: Besides the communications sector, the broadcast and education markets have been aggressive. Moreover, there have been sales to the defense and other PSUs too. The easing of US sanctions since October 2001 has enabled several global players like Agilent, Acterna, and Tektronix to sell their products all around. During the sanctions, they were not able to sell even oscilloscopes with 1G sample/second performance. Today, they can even sell to agencies like Aeronautical Development Establishment, the Electronics and Radar Development Establishment, Bharat Electronics, HAL, DRDO, ISRO, among other entities. The licenses to supply get cleared in four-six weeks time.

n Solutions, not Just Boxes: Most of the large vendors today talk of a solution. Even oscilloscopes are being sold with solutions built around them. The solutions approach will stay as the service providers would be looking at network monitoring, QoS for various networks—be it the data, optical, mobile, satellite, or cable TV—and fraud/churn management as some of the main ways to bring about service differentiation. T&M business is changing from tender-basis to rational investment procurement decision. However, it will take time before T&M will be seen as a tool for justifying the return on investment.

n Big Vendors Rule: Most of the leading vendors like Agilent, Acterna, and Tektronix have made significant wins. Some of the large orders that were finalized last year were that of MTNL for 24 OTDR-Type B, 9 SDH analyzers STM 1/4 and SDH analyzers STM1/4/16; BSNL tender for 175 mini OTDRs, 20 WDM analyzers, 38 OTDRs. These orders were close to Rs 70 crore. This year the investment on OTDRs has been slightly less considering the fact that most of the fiber backbone has already been built. During the globally downturn period, in the past couple of years too, the T&M vendors grew on an average of 10–12 percent. But this year, they could be seeing close to 20–25 percent growth.

While Agilent Technologies has complete portfolio of solutions for all types of telecom providers assisting through design, network optimization, technology migration, and implementation from spectrum analyzers to network analyzers to antenna testing, Tektronix is very strong in protocol analyzers, besides other products. It is believed that Tektronix has close to 85 percent market share in this arena. Acterna is strong in the OTDR and DWDM analyzers and has solutions covering optical transport, cable, wireless, data IP, and access network.

Others like ICT, Fastech, Anirtsu, Seven Hills, Aishwarya Telecom, and Trinity Electronics have also made significant inroads into BSNL/MTNL market. ICT Electronics/Trend addressing PDH, SDH, and SONET technologies got orders for SDH analyzers and also on the access side, supplied test solutions for ATM, ISDN, DSL, etc. Fastech, which distributes, Sunrise Telecom’s solutions, is strong on the handheld side. On the RF side, Anirtsu too has some good successes. Other majors like Sunrise, Nettest, and Fluke are present through distributors. Some of the big-time distributors include AIMIL, Aplab, Fastech, Forbes Gokak, Meera Agencies, Scientific Mes-Tek, VXL, etc. In the BSNL tenders, ITI has also supplied SDH/PDH products.

n Future Perfect: With the telecom horizon becoming distinct, the belief is that the likes of Bharti, Tata, Reliance, and Hutchison, and those like GAIL and Power Grid are all there for future. It is not possible for them to roll out services without the T&M vendors. And probably, the service providers will focus on their core business and leave the measurement and management operations to the T&M companies. Further, though the telecom operators may be looking for business within the country, in future they may looking at other opportunities like looking at handling outsourced back-end operations. One of the most significant things to happen to the T&M industry, besides the telecom growth is the joint T&M solution development. All the major vendors, be it the Agilent, Tektronix, or National Instruments, have software development centres in India and are working with other global development centres globally. India could become the test bed.