Telecom: World seeks Indian alternative to Chinese telecom solutions

The Indian IT services industry will play a significant role in providing such solutions by creating new revenue models and developing the requisite talent ecosystem to drive enterprise 5G use cases, the experts, who were speaking during a roundtable with ET and technology industry body Nasscom, said.

“The geopolitical situation (is) obviously causing disruptions in the supply chain. There’s this conversation about China Plus One in terms of ‘where will the alternative supply chain come from’ and people are looking at India from every aspect of being able to deliver those solutions,” said Jagdish Mitra — chief strategy officer at Tech Mahindra.

According to a recent Nasscom report, 5G is expected to power up to 2% of India’s Gross Domestic Product, amounting to $180 billion by 2030. With little scope to drastically improve unit pricing (average revenue per user or ARPU) in the retail telecom segment, the use of 5G in enterprises is expected to be the next growth avenue. “With consumers, you can have an ARPU improvement right up to a certain limit and no consumer is going to pay double the price. So the focus is on the enterprise segment, which is going to actually drive the business case for 5G itself,” said Gnanapriya C, associate vice president at software services firm Infosys.

India currently has the second highest number of telecom users in the world at 1.1 billion, of which 740 million are 4G customers. 5G is expected to create new value through hyper-connectivity and catalyse digital transformation across sectors.

The country needs at least five times the existing pool of 5G-ready technology talent to address the large-scale enterprise demand, said Achyuta Ghosh, head of Nasscom Insight, adding that this is something the Nasscom Future Skills platform can address.

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“The good part is that the 5G skill set has a large overlap with traditional Indian skill sets of AI , IoT (internet of things), Big Data, cloud diversity; those kinds of skill sets are already available, they will be required from a 5G perspective…but there would be a demand-supply gap,” Ghosh said.
India will need around 22 million people skilled in various 5G capabilities by 2025, according to the telecom sector skills council. Ghosh said that even minor certifications in areas like security, network maintenance and operations can bring in more talent to the 5G pool.

The Indian IT services industry will play a significant role in providing such solutions by creating new revenue models and developing the requisite talent ecosystem to drive enterprise 5G use cases, the experts, who were speaking during a roundtable with ET and technology industry body Nasscom, said.

“The geopolitical situation (is) obviously causing disruptions in the supply chain. There’s this conversation about China Plus One in terms of ‘where will the alternative supply chain come from’ and people are looking at India from every aspect of being able to deliver those solutions,” said Jagdish Mitra — chief strategy officer at Tech Mahindra.

According to a recent Nasscom report, 5G is expected to power up to 2% of India’s Gross Domestic Product, amounting to $180 billion by 2030. With little scope to drastically improve unit pricing (average revenue per user or ARPU) in the retail telecom segment, the use of 5G in enterprises is expected to be the next growth avenue. “With consumers, you can have an ARPU improvement right up to a certain limit and no consumer is going to pay double the price. So the focus is on the enterprise segment, which is going to actually drive the business case for 5G itself,” said Gnanapriya C, associate vice president at software services firm Infosys.

India currently has the second highest number of telecom users in the world at 1.1 billion, of which 740 million are 4G customers. 5G is expected to create new value through hyper-connectivity and catalyse digital transformation across sectors.

The country needs at least five times the existing pool of 5G-ready technology talent to address the large-scale enterprise demand, said Achyuta Ghosh, head of Nasscom Insight, adding that this is something the Nasscom Future Skills platform can address.

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“The good part is that the 5G skill set has a large overlap with traditional Indian skill sets of AI , IoT (internet of things), Big Data, cloud diversity; those kinds of skill sets are already available, they will be required from a 5G perspective…but there would be a demand-supply gap,” Ghosh said.
India will need around 22 million people skilled in various 5G capabilities by 2025, according to the telecom sector skills council. Ghosh said that even minor certifications in areas like security, network maintenance and operations can bring in more talent to the 5G pool.