This is a short snippet of interview conducted by ITVoir Team with Mr. Jayant Deo, President RAD, India.

 

Q.1 What’s RAD’s vision on the INDUSTRY? Where does it expect to be in the next 5 years?

Ans. Despite the global economic downturn, the Indian telecom segment continues to shine bright. The Indian Telecom Growth Story is very robust because the next 250 Million subscribers will be mostly Rural based Indian citizens. The current economic slowdown shall not deter this growth beyond a few quarters. Certainly the global situation is a unique opportunity for India (and therefore Indian telecom) because it is accepted worldwide that India is one of the least affected countries, and therefore investor confidence will revive soonest for India.
The introduction of 3G and WiMAX services will surely increase traffic and strain on service providers’ networks and this would also create a big gap between the exponential increase in traffic and the revenue generated by the operator. This will lead to a serious backhaul challenge for service providers and this problem can be solved with the help of cost-effectively utilizing existing transmission infrastructure. Our backhaul solutions are ideally placed to help service providers, incumbent and new carriers to address the backhaul bottleneck challenge in a cost efficient manner.

Q.2 How you are working on Next Generation Network (NGN)?

Ans. At RAD, we work on diverse networking technologies in the legacy (TDM) access and New Generation (IP/MPLS/packet) access. Several of our new products are recognized as ‘Best Technology’ NGN product in its class during 2008. We realized that the world is not going to changeover all its networks from legacy to NGN in a flash, and therefore, ‘cross-generation’ access networks will be needed for a long period of time. Currently you will see that the whole world requires such ‘cross-generation’ solutions and that’s how we are ideally poised with plenty of products and solutions to cater to both legacy and NGN networks.


Q.3 What are the new fields, other than voice and data access solution, you are working for?

Ans. We are not a single-product or single-technology company since 1981. We work through different protocols, networking layers and diverse range of applications. Apart from providing access to voice and data networks, we provide various kinds of ‘backhaul’ and ‘optimization’ solutions for Mobile Service Providers (GSM, CDMA, 3G, WiMAX) to cater to increasing burden of bandwidths across their networks, that allows them to provide cost-effective user services by reducing opex and capex,

Q.4 What is your future plans for India?

Ans. We firmly believe in the huge potential of India. This is a very important market for us and we continue to build strong relations with all our customers. Keeping in mind the importance of our presence in major geographical centers, we have recently opened branch office in the NCR region and will soon have a branch in South India.

Moving forward, we will continue to invest more in terms of:
a)    our R&D efforts to specifically design and develop products that are suitable for Indian market
b)    our Business Development efforts to specifically design and implement Applications & solutions that are suitable for Indian customers
c)    our Technical support efforts to specifically cater to the demanding needs of our fast growing base of customers in India and neighbouring countries.

Q.6 Sir, can you tell me how the “pay-as-you-grow” in VoIP services help the organization?

Ans. In simple terms, a VoIP service can be setup using RAD’s RVS system in the minimal initial investment, without sacrificing any functionality and with easy-to-use NMS capabilities. As the VoIP user base grows, the organization can add marginal incremental investment, thereby maintaining ‘per-user-capex’ at the optimum level.


Q.7 What are the company’s steps to check the recessionary effects on its sales and profits?
 
Ans. The Indian telecom market is not showing any signs of recession, in fact it continues to expand its reach to tap the unconnected regions of the country. As such, we are not facing recessionary trends in sales and profits in India and neighbouring markets, so we continue to invest in our efforts as explained earlier.

Anuj/Malvikka ITVoir Team