Next Gen Broadband
According to Arun Gupta, director, P-GIS, BRM-SCANZ, Philips Electronics India, more and more enterprises will look at rich media applications with the increase in broadband availability. Thus, basic applications will now change to full scope applications. "The shift will be dramatic in the case of mobile broadband as compared to fixed broadband. The Indian market has adopted mobile-based applications with velocity that surpass many developed markets. The simple example has been the data cards on the laptop," he adds.

Today, all major service providers are also deploying next generation networks to deliver more enhanced and converged broadband applications in the future. With the increase in availability of broadband a number of new initiatives will become reality across industry verticals and a few processes irrespective of the industry segment. For instance, order fulfillment across industries can be expedited with the help of increased broadband penetration.

Some key emerging areas of broadband applications include advertising by enterprises at Point-of-Sale locations like ATM and retail outlets, particularly in BFSI and retail; for e-Governance in the government sector and video broadcast to off-sites like billboards, by the media sector.

Solutions Trends
According to Rajiv Gerela, GM, Technology at Wipro BPO, as one would note from the various types of applications that are emerging, the demand is not just for pure bandwidth but for many solutions around the way such applications are going to be set up and offered. "Pure bandwidth will play a big role and up ahead may become a bottleneck as well in deployment of such services. But for now, with decreasing bandwidth costs, the market and innovators are all at play trying to build their turf," he explains.

With decreasing bandwidth costs and ARPUs, the service providers themselves are eyeing more high value and high margin markets. As a result, they are also more than eager to serve the growing demand for offerings besides pure bandwidth. Furthermore, they are now trying to generate new service markets and create the demand for them.

While VoIP, videoconferencing and webconferencing are emerging solutions, enterprises are now increasingly looking at customized solutions that address their communication requirements, other than pure bandwidth. Bindal feels that the need of the hour is customized end-to-end communication solutions that address the unique requirements of different industries and telecom service providers and will increasingly offer integrated solutions in the coming days. "The difference between yesterday and tomorrow would be creation of robust, scalable fat pipe, which can flawlessly take care of the hosted services coupled with excellent customer support from service providers," he adds.

There is already a shift happening from conventional point to point leased lines towards MPLS networks and managed services as these offer better control and network efficiency to the enterprise. Enterprise networks are moving away from traditional TDM based private CUG network to MPLS based IP VPN CUG network. According to Saji, MPLS solutions are proven to be secure and scalable to a large extent. Any enterprise network can grow by just patching up their new central/regional/branch offices and agents to an MPLS SP cloud with a local loop.

Over a period of time, managed services will also gain momentum over basic connectivity. Many service providers have already made the transition. "With telecom service providers expanding their basket of services, I expect that end-to-end management of networks and shared data center services, including disaster recovery options, will become mainstream offerings," says Gupta.

The basic difference today is the service levels offered as compared to the past when there was no focus on SLAs. This has provided the impetus towards creating and deploying mission critical applications over the distributed enterprise, which was earlier limited by the lack of quality connectivity. It's no longer a risky proposition to deploy applications using connectivity solutions in multiple ways including and not limited by the Internet, mobile phones, and PDAs.

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