A cloud computing-based telecom network with virtualization of its various elements and the rollout of a fiber optic network closer to homes will be able to solve the call drop issue in India, a senior HCL Technologies official said here.
Speaking to PTI at Mobile World Congress, HCL Tech Chief Technology Officer Kalyan Kumar said demand for data has increased significantly in the wake of the pandemic and telecom operators are gradually moving to cloud computing systems to manage capacity on the network .
“Fiber infrastructure reaching almost to the house, cloudification of telecommunications and virtualization of the network. These are the three things that will solve the call drop issue. We cannot solve the problem by just addressing one issue,” he said.
India’s telecoms regulator took seriously the complaints related to dropped calls and service quality issues, and last week ordered telecom service providers to file service quality reports for each state and union territory. Telcos are required to report more detailed data that helps identify patchy networks and problem areas in advance.
According to the Nokia Mobile Broadband Index (MBiT) report, mobile data traffic in India has grown 3.2 times over the past five years.
Average data consumption per user has increased sharply from 9.7 GB in 2018 to reach 19.5 GB per user per month in 2022.
“Is the telecom network entirely software-based? The answer is no. Telecom companies are partly software based. They are not fully cloudified. If they are fully cloud-based and software-based, they can plan capacity based on off-the-shelf hardware. Encoding is the foundation to help solve the call-abandonment problem,” said Kumar.
He said moving networks to cloud computing systems gives telecom operators insight into demand, as well as elasticity, flexibility, scalability and interoperability to adapt networks to demand.
“I think the demand is outstripping the supply. So this whole telco cloud is becoming very important because in the cloud you can add data center edge, virtualization and software and add compute nodes,” said Kumar.
HCL Tech has increased its focus on 5G networks with the launch of the 5G System Integration Framework to enable public and private 5G operators to seamlessly deploy and integrate critical components of a future-ready network. It has also announced the CloudSMART Modernization Experience and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) technology platforms.
Kumar said the company is optimistic about cloud adoption by telecom operators. The company has announced a collaboration with Dell Technologies to provide network modernization solutions for communications service providers and enterprises.
Under the terms of the collaboration, HCLTech will provide end-to-end system integration services for vRAN (virtualized radio access networks), ORAN (open radio access networks), private 5G networks and multi-access edge computing deployments, including telecom network transformation, design, interoperability, optimization and managed services.
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