Indian telecom has gone beyond borders. It has set global benchmark on
business optimization and offered low cost models, while adding millions of
customers every month. But home grown telecos', both operators and telecom
equipment makers including VAS players are yet to take up innovation as their
main thrust. They lack direction, R&D budget, innovative approach and execution
abilities. Their main bottleneck is their R&D budget which is not enough to
address the market potential. Most of the innovations collapse during the
initial phase itself.
Global telecom companies have taken the lead. They are going head over heals
for newer innovations in handsets, in wireless technology and in services time
and again for users. Indian companies are developing new technologies and
services but these innovations are facing difficulties to reach the market.
Major telecom giants like Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Samsung, Nokia, Vodafone
and other global players keep their annual budget for research and development
considerable enough to bring out telecom innovations for applications. IT firms
such as Cisco, IBM and HP, chip companies like Qualcomm and Intel have earmarked
substantial funds for telecom innovation.
Last year's annual budget of global telecom players speaks out for
themselves. What is interesting to note is that whatever innovations and latest
developments we see in telecom industry in India these days are through these
global players who introduces them to Indian consumers. Indian companies in this
regard are a step behind.
Indian telcos talk R&D in few hundred crore of rupees. Research and
development department has always been on the loose end for the companies when
it comes to allotting budget for technical innovations in India. KR Naik,
executive chairman, DIGILINK, says that the main thing lacking in R&D is volume
– the economies of scale are just not present, and thus the R&D spend becomes
very high, with insufficient turnover. “We are currently working with outside
partners who supply in large volumes to several companies. Moreover, there are a
lot of small companies which exclusively handle R&D. R&D should work for
multiple customers to spread cost and investment – not just in the Indian
market, but for the global market as well. For active products, there is a big
market, but for passive products, there are only six players in India today.”
What is best practiced is the instant adoption of global practices. Vivekanand
Venugopal, VP & GM, Hitachi Data Systems India, says telecom innovation has
taken a back seat in India. “We have not seen any innovative VAS service in the
country. But with 3G and BWA coming in, operators will be looking at innovative
services. So far, telecos focused on launching the network and voice business.
Next generation services will prompt operators and equipment vendors to look for
innovation. The government can also play a larger role in promotion telecom
R&D.”
However, we cannot deny that many companies are doing their bit to bring out
new and innovative deals and services for users locally these days. With 300
million telephone subscribers today, India boasts of having the second largest
telecom network in the world after China. The country is adding some 8.5 million
to 10 million new mobile subscribers to the network every month to also emerge
as one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world. So, market no doubt
is growing by leaps and bounds for Indian telcos and innovations are part and
parcel of these developments.
Even though the time and budget has always been biggest constraints for
researchers in telecom industry, telecos are coming up with new and exciting
innovations which can be watched out by global companies in next couple of
years. We are trying to analyse few of the innovations showcased at the recent
Aegis Graham Bell Award nominations meet.
mKrishi
TCS for its new business opportunities in rural market has come up with
mKrishi (Mobile Krishi or Mobile Agriculture) to facilitate the rapid adoption
of mobile phones in rural India. mKrishi offers personalized and integrated
services specifically for farmers by combining multiple technologies such as
cellular networks, mid-range mobile handsets, weather and soil sensor
technologies to bring vital information regarding local weather, fertilizer
requirement based on soil conditions, pest control, and current food grain
prices in local markets in a rich content format to the farmer's low-end mobile
handsets. mKrishi also gives facility to farmers for sending crop images to the
experts for analysis. Recently TCS demonstrated the effectiveness of mKrishi in
the procurement of pulses in Tamil Nadu, India.
This innovative method was realized by TCS for farmers who today require
personalized services regarding farming as well as poultry, cattle, micro
credit, crop insurance and government policies and mKrishi was conceptualized
keeping these in mind.
This is the first time that such specialized and personalized service for
farmers has come up which in coming years can bring in huge revenue generation
from rural India.
Mobile Couponing
Mobile couponing is getting fancy of marketers, who are accountable to track
and measure campaign effectiveness and justify ROI of campaign. CanvasM has
introduced an innovative mobile couponing solution to address the key challenge
around mobile coupon value chain participants by simplifying complexities to
present highly differentiating features in a user friendly manner. The solution
offers multiple benefits for the retail consumer base which is expected to
generate and line up loyalty based and non loyalty based consumers.
Mobile Couponing brings in benefits of personalization with its unique
feature of providing enhanced user experience-making it paperless with the Go
Green factor; an easy access to information and latest offers while on-the-move,
search feature for appropriate coupons/offers with reminders; ready to access
information and coupons for redemption at point of sale with one barcode image
(card) on handset which can either be saved on handset or retrieved through GPRS/SMS
whenever required; keeping the complete purchase record for any future
validation and budget verifications and planning.
According to Juniper research, mobile coupon technology is expected to reach
300 mn redemption worldwide by 2014 principally in developed markets with the
apps revolution triggering the growth of new mobile coupon service. The retail
redemption values of the mobile coupons are expected to be $6 bn globally.
Clever Texting technology
India is home to more than 600 mn mobile phone users and many of these users
don't know English, hence texting becomes a challenge for them.
Luna Ergonomics has developed the first dictionary less statistical
predictive texting technology which uses a dynamic allocation of keys and hence
does not rely on printed keys on the keypad. This offers the possibility of
supporting multiple languages on the same keypad.
The technology places characters to positions comfortable to the texting
thumb by predicting from the statistical nature of a particular language mined
from large amounts of text corpuses. Also this is single key press typing.
CleverTexting has been developed for all the major languages of the world.
The technology offers immense opportunities. For operators and VAS players,
the usability makes it possible for people to send SMS in regional languages
particularly when the focus of Indian operators is expansion in rural markets.
The Panini Keypad also offers a usability to type in Indian languages easily
on the web and on the PC to fill forms in Indian languages or to chat and other
applications. Licensing costs have been kept low and affordable considering the
value that is delivered to the user and its desirability. According to the
company, SMS compression increases the payload of the Indian language SMS from
70 characters per SMS to about 200.
Customer Experience Index
In the wake of a fiercely heated landscape of telecom marked by constant
high churn, tariff wars and the imminence of mobile number portability; the
Indian mobile telephony industry has never been in greater need of tangible
index for customer experience. Customer experience which may be defined as the
sum of all the touch-point interactions (direct/indirect) that the customer has
with the service provider is undoubtedly the best indicator of a service
provider's performance.
Amdocs' Customer Experience Index is a first of its kind initiative in
association with Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies (SIMS) to provide the
Indian telecom industry with a rating of service provider offerings based on end
user feedback on all marketing and technology touch points.
The Index provides the service provider and industry with a panoramic view of
performance across parameters ranging across the product lifecycle covering four
major areas-service awareness, service initiation, in-service experience and
service termination.
This undertaking is an attempt to take the Indian telecom industry's ongoing
innovation practices to greater heights by weaving in customer experience
tangibility and consequent enhancement a part of its bigger success.
| Voice&Data Opinion |
|
Create Rs 10,000 crore Innovation Fund India lacks innovation. Ratan Tata,
who brought out Nano car, may be an exception. To improve innovation in
telecom, Indian government should encourage buying of locally made goods.
This can be done through offering incentives to buyers. Also, MNCs should
set up manufacturing base in India before they can sell any single chip /
equipment. It should be a pre-condition when we approve FDI. This will
ensure the setting up of telecom equipment manufacturing in India. Indian
telcos – Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, Reliance
Industries, etc. should increase R&D budget. Thanks to the emergence of
managed services, they are becoming marketing companies in India selling
services. Why can not India spend a part of the money received from 3G/BWA
spectrum auction to create a Rs 10,000 crore innovation fund? This will give
enough moolah for aspiring innovators |
Zero Opex Solar BTS
VNL, a part of the Shyam Telecom group, has developed a zero-opex
solar-powered GSM base station for use in rural areas. The GSM based network
designed for rural areas supports as low as 150 subscribers and can go up to
15,000 subscribers. The equipment consumes less power. It is also fully
compatible with technologies such as GPRS and CAMEL. The product is also compact
in size with mobile switching center, base station in a single cabinet. (The VNL
innovation was not part of Aegis Graham Bell awards)
FLYPP
Today technology savvy consumers across the world have become ardent users
of interactive mobile applications, downloading over 1.35 bn instances in 2009
and this number is expected to grow to over 18 bn by 2014. Mobile operators can
meet the needs of users more effectively with a platform that provides a
repository of applications, an application storefront and third party
partnerships for application programming. Flypp from Infosys is a white labeled,
ready-to-launch application platform for mobile operators to enable monetization
through a portfolio of ready-to-use experiential applications across more than
3,000 devices.
Flypp reduces operational risk and overheads for the mobile operator, while
accelerating innovation. It increases share of wallet per user and empowers
users with a broad spectrum of ready-to-use experiential applications. The
application portfolio enables advanced user experience such as digital
merchandising that further boosts the revenue opportunities for operators.
On the other hand, Flypp provides independent software vendors, a viable and
attractive channel to showcase and monetize their proprietary applications
across multiple geographies and service providers.
With Flypp, mobile users will have easy and user-friendly means of
discovering, buying and using applications on their mobile through a variety of
channels eg On-device Portal (ODP), application store, on-line, in-store, etc.
All this will be available to users using handsets from any manufacturer.
OpenScape UC
While unified communications has grown rapidly over the past couple of
years, it hasn't matched the exponential growth of social networking
applications, most notably Twitter on smart phones.
Developers at Siemens Enterprise Communications conceptualized Twitter
functionality for the OpenScape Unified Communications (UC) application on smart
phones for their users while running in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon
EC2) environment.
OpenScape can scan Twitter text and, when it spots words or other strings
that have been set up as key words, it can then perform one or more
predetermined actions. Developers decided to leave the configuration process 'as
open as possible', so that people could structure their communication in a way
that was natural to them opposed to reflecting a CTO or other management
mentality.
This is a strategic decision for Siemens as these functionalities will be
part of their UC solution road map. This not only will create the new business
opportunities for the company but moreover be a revolution in the communication.
Real-Time Charging
Telcordia Real-Time Charging and Policy has come up with an innovative
differentiator that turns a charging system into one of the most powerful
differentiators for a Communication Service Providers (CSP).
Personalization is not just changing service delivery. It's also shaping
expectations. Today, customers want voice, data, video, and music on one device.
They want to make VoIP calls while downloading messages. They want post-paid
mobile service at work and prepaid during personal time. They want to put
spending limits on their children's mobile downloads and many more.
The Telcordia Real-Time Charging solution has provided innovative charging
services for Tata DOCOMO, Uninor and Aircel in India and with other carriers
worldwide. It is the technology that allowed India to be the first to launch
innovation services including per-second billing and per-character SMS billing.
The most important development in the Indian mobile telecommunications
industry is undoubtedly the launch of 3G services in coming times. These mobile
broadband services will change the way people live and not just the way they use
their mobile phones.
To mark their identities in this highly competitive industry, CSPs will be
able to introduce differentiated services and applications to attract new
subscribers and retain existing subscribers by telecos.
The Indian telecom industry is no doubt on the rise, and innovations are
being conceptualized and piloted. However, mark of their reality can only be
felt when they will actually be launched and accessed by consumers in coming
years. The path is chosen but still there are miles to go and with these
innovations it surely seems that the there is a silver lining to this dark
cloud. India can not even think of an Indian Apple bringing out iPhone or iPad.
We are not considering a home grown 5G. China and Japan have their own
definitions and technologies for 3G and 4G. It's time for us to come out of
woods and do bette
Akanksha Singh
akankshas@cybermedia.co.in
Page(s) 1
Print
Comment
Email
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
