| |February 20178CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONWith 24 years of wide experience in Wireless Technologies, building domain expertise in Network Design, RAN and VAS sales, Gulshan is currently working as , Joint President & CTO at Reliance Communication.elecommunications is per-ceived as one of the key in-frastructure component for rapid economic development during the formative years of any economy. In the early 90's telephone density in India was about 0.8 per hundred persons as against the world average of 10 per hundred persons. It was also lower than that of many developing countries of Asia like China (1.7), Pakistan (2), Malaysia (13) etc. There were about 8 million lines with a waiting list of about 2.5 million. Over a period of time, data communication experience got enriched through the evolution from GPRS to EDGE/CDMA1X to 3G/ EVDO to HSPA+/EVDO to a comparatively new wide band technology on LTE.At the beginning of this decade, 3G penetration in India's geography was quite low, in fact it was ranked worst on list of top 30 countries­chosen on the basis of subscriber's base. The patchy 3G service and expensive tariffs were two major concerns for poor 3G adoption. While the Telecom vendors and operators were busy enhancing the throughput capabilities for the consumers by means of deploying better Radio Techniques and Adaptive modulation mechanisms, there was a shortage of overall offering of a solution to the consumer who had the needs of checking real time presence, video telephony, data sharing and many other point to point and group communication needs. With the widespread availability of HSPA techniques, the average throughputs for consumers were reaching 2-4Mbps (depending on various factors via Handsets, Radio environment etc). But the native Technology was still not ready with fancy consumer services to meet market requirement.This shortcoming was fulfilled with the advent of Over the Top or OTT service providers. Initially Telecom players experimented with Integrated IP multimedia Services to cater to the Rich communication needs but the complex architecture and "operator specific" deployments were a deterrent in this direction along with cost and phone capabilities.TEra of Unified Service OfferingBy Gulshan Khurana, Joint President & CTO, Reliance Communication
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