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Open Source in Telecom: The Indian Opportunity

Indian Opportunity

-Devasia Kurian

Development of communication infrastructure has profound influence in the economic development of a country.

India, well-positioned to experience a huge economic thrust, is looking forward to heavy investment and improvement of its telecom infrastructure. The adoption of Open Source (OS) products in the telecom scenario will restrict the dollar outflow, as well as bring in well advanced infrastructure in-line with developed countries.

Open Source software is produced by a community of developers, published with source code and mostly free to be distributed. The OS Software is combined with suitable hardware forms and multiple telecom products like Mobile Phone, PBX, Voice Logger and Class 4 Switches.

OS Software generally follows open standards, making them interoperable with many other devices. Developing expertise in this area and moving towards intelligent usage of these products can be very helpful to achieve the next steps in India’s telecom advancement.

The adoption of Android, an OS mobile operating system, by many Indian companies like Micromax, Karbonn has changed the mobile landscape. These companies are able to manufacture phones comparable in features with their foreign counterparts at almost one fifth the price. We are also expecting more manufacturers coming to the mobile scenario with Android as base operating system.

Enterprise Telecom is a huge segment, where Open Source can play a vital role. Call centres can be equipped with software’s like; Vicidial or Asterisk, which improves the efficiency of agent’s multi-fold. These products are comparable with proprietary products from established companies like Avaya, Cisco, Aspect and so on.

Every sizeable enterprise requires a PBX, and there are multiple OS PBXes available. 2012 statistics from Eastern Management says that 18% of telephone lines shipped in North America is OS based. None of the proprietary companies like Siemens, Nortel and Alcatel can claim these numbers. A guess of the share of OS PBX in Indian PBX market would be less than 1%.

Freeswitch, SER etc. are the popular Class 4 switches. The price difference in this segment between proprietary solutions and OS solutions are multi-fold.

Price is not the only deciding factor for adoption of OS. The main advantage is the availability of source code. Many times, the solutions might not be exactly suited for the customers’ requirements. In such cases, the customer can himself modify the program to suit his needs. This flexibility is required in many critical situations.

OS products are available for all telecom segments – right from end-customer to enterprises to infrastructure providers. Openness and adoption of these products can bring in considerable gain to our economy. We are seeing many PSUs adopting multiple OS products. An example is Railways making Asterisk PBX, an integral part of their Vision 2020.

Open Source also provides an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs to enter the telecom scenario with new generation products and services. In our current scenario, India is keen to promote products being manufactured and supported in the country.

The country-wide adoption of OS products and ecosystem will promote our PM, Narendra Modi’s ‘Make-In-India’ campaign.

(The author is the CEO of AstTecs. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of Channel Times or any of the websites managed or operated by Trivone Digital Services)

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