Tekelec MD for India Rajesh Kaul sees huge opportunities in the explosive Indian market as it leverages its existing signaling deployments into new number portability business
Billing & OSS Supplement: India's telecom market has completely transformed over the past three years. With a strong customer base in India, what do you see as operators' key challenges?
Rajesh Kaul: In the short term, Indian operators face two main issues: rapidly scaling to meet demand, and number portability. India's wireless growth is unique, and service providers must create the infrastructure to support hundreds of millions of new subscribers each year. Also, number portability has a year-end deadline, and is the world's largest number portability deployment.
Long term, Indian operators have the same challenge as other global operators: complexity from the evolution of network technology. New devices, protocols and services enter the network faster than legacy ones leave, meaning that operators must support an ever-widening range of technologies to meet subscribers' expectations. The complementary challenge is that operators want to maximize the value of existing equipment, while simultaneously transitioning to next-generation networks like LTE.
While experiencing hyper-growth, what is your outlook for voice and SMS in India over the next few years? How soon until they become commoditized like in so many other markets?
Voice ARPU is quickly declining in India, turning operators more to SMS as a revenue-generating service. Operators here are finding that, as in other markets, the younger generations are driving adoption and wider use.
SMS will not be a commodity for at least a few more years due to several factors. The first is subscriber growth. As with other markets, subscribers in India typically don't begin with "bucket" plans that erode profits and lower ARPU. In fact, the average Indian sends 29 SMS per month, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
Vital Analytics released a report in July saying that almost 5% of service provider revenue comes from SMS value-added services, making them the highest revenue earning VAS. We expect this to be a highly profitable VAS for several years.
What opportunities does the number portability mandate create for Tekelec?
The mandate is an opportunity to extend our business in India, which we've done by winning four number portability deals in the second quarter. Prior to the mandate, we already had signaling solutions in five of the country's seven largest operators.
Our number portability solution integrates with our signaling platform and advanced database management functions, giving operators a seamless approach to a complex problem. Because our product works for voice, SMS, MMS and prepaid services, operators get a single solution.
India is the latest example of number portability providing add-on business for us where we already had deployed signaling solutions. According to Analysys Mason, we have a 35% global market share for real-time connection number portability solutions. We now have number portability solutions ordered or deployed with 91 service providers in 32 countries. We have additional opportunities in India, as well as in many other countries around the world.
With your broad experience in this area, what lessons from deployments in other countries can you bring to India?
While government defines the criteria to implement number portability (such as interconnection and conveyance charges between operators), service providers independently can decide the best method to implement it. The top considerations that our customers have shared with us are flexibility, scalability and cost effectiveness.
The most flexible solutions can be stand-alone or integrated with signaling platforms. Scalability is especially important in large and fast-growing markets like India, where operators have to support hundreds of millions of numbers. And cost effectiveness of course affects all technology deployments. Service providers must be able to minimize capex and opex for number portability while maintaining a level of service so that subscribers don't experience any disruptions.
How important is the Indian market for Tekelec and what services are most in demand?
India has been and remains an important to Tekelec, with the explosive growth in subscribers and services and the number portability regulation. We expect that the Indian market is likely to be one of our largest markets for the next several years. We have a local office with a team of 40, including contract personnel.
India is our largest near-term number portability opportunity, and past experience in other markets has shown that number portability deployments often lead to additional signaling, monitoring and messaging business. We see compelling business cases for our next-generation SIP signaling platform, the EAGLE XG, and our performance management and mobile messaging solutions, as operators look for innovative ways to increase revenues and improve customer service.