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The largest chunk of revenues for the communication T&M industry came from the wireless segment, which saw a continued surge in subscriber base. As wireless service providers led the investment in infrastructure, either through new network deployments or upgrades, their T&M requirements were also more.

Within wireless, the growth areas were GSM/GPRS as well as CDMA 2000. Deployment of EDGE by several service providers in a number of circles also led to T&M spend.

In the wireline space, growth came through the deployment of MPLS technology as well as some initiatives toward next generation SDH.

Some service providers made sizeable investments in test tools last year as they deployed new networks/technologies, while many others did not invest as much in T&M.

In some projects where new technologies got deployed, the spend was quite high whereas some other service providers have outsourced network maintenance activities and are not investing on test tools separately.

Handset repairs also attracted further investments from NEMs. Similarly, the R&D activity in wireless also witnessed growth.

Overall, the Indian communication T&M market is understood to have grown at a rate of 11 percent. Although this many not sound very high, it was almost double the rate at which the industry grew in the FY 2003–04. That year, the industry had grown at a rate of 5.6 percent to clock revenues of Rs 293.5 crore.

In the fiscal 2004–05, the communication T&M industry's revenues in India stood at around Rs 325 crore, with Agilent continuing to be the market leader. Acterna was positioned at the second spot, followed by Tektronix in terms of revenues.

Rhode & Schwarz is understood to have done well this year and clocked revenues in the range of Rs 45 crore. National Instruments also made some significant dents in the space under discussion.

Among others, Anritsu was notable. Spirent continued to strengthen its presence in the Indian market through existing channels. The company established a direct presence in the country, mainly for development and global customer support functions.

T&M for QoS
It's easier to acquire customers than to retain them. Customer acquisition is a routine, achieved through measures like marketing exercises, promos, VAS offerings, etc. Customer retention and churn management are not so given. It's a complex exercise that involves an interdependent play of various network elements.

The ultimate objective is to offer a quality of service (QoS) that's better than the competition. No customer relationship management program can be successful without having QoS blocks in place.

In this light, the role of the right T&M instruments becomes critical. It's an anomaly that the average T&M spend by service providers continues to be abysmally low, despite the rising QoS expectations of subscribers.

Industry watchers comment that the T&M spend of service providers is merely one percent of the overall capex. This, however, is likely to go up once service providers craft clearer strategies for improving network quality.

However, service providers may also choose to deal with the QoS issue by taking recourse to outsourcing. Bharti is a case in point.

Bharti's network outsourcing deal with Ericsson involved providing quality assurance in all the 13 circles for which the deal is applicable.

In FY 2004–05, Agilent introduced new solutions like N2X for testing MPLS technology on core routers, next-generation SDH network elements, and network testers for applications running on layers 4–7. On the wireless front, Agilent introduced Wideband Peak Power Meters, one-box testers for WLAN, enhancements on multi-format one-box testers for mobile handsets, and many new solutions for emerging communication applications like UWB.

Framescope Pro was introduced for access network testing. Introduction of new basic tools such as mixed signal scopes were also relevant.

Tektronix announced the availability of its large-scale load generation solution for VoIP and converged networks, the Spectra2 product line. The Spectra2 large-scale load solution is built using Spectra2 version 4.0 software and Tektronix' new Wideband Trunking Interface (WTI) processing cards. This solution delivers up to six Gigabit Ethernet, STM-1, or OC-3 interfaces in a single Spectra2 server.

The Outlook
New value-added services from communications service providers and increased awareness among consumers about QoS and also about alternate choices will drive the investments in T&M.

Software is playing a growing role in test applications. Sometimes PCs or laptops running applications software provide relevant data.

While for most measurement applications a hardware front end is still required for acquiring data and performing parametric or functional measurements. For analysis and other details, the dependence is largely on software.

In the area of large communications networks, performance management can't be done manually. Such needs are essentially fulfilled by software solutions.

Looking ahead, the spurt in subscriber growth also initiated the long awaited push to local manufacturing of handsets. Global NEMs and contract manufacturers have started operations or have announced investments in the direction.

Also, once service providers have overcome the more immediate challenges of managing growth, they will pay more attention to reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) for network equipment and that of service operation. This will lead to a higher spend on T&M, as they help reduce the TCO over the course of a network lifecycle.

Deepak Kumar