Telecom is an Enabler for Many Other Industries: Mudit Agarwal, EVP - Planning and Networks, Vodafone Idea

When talking about the future of Deep Tech in India, the telecom sector undoubtedly plays an extremely important role. This is because telecom is both a vertical and more importantly a horizontal. Vertical is an industry that drives a set of components in the economy, and horizontal is an enabler, said Mudit Agarwal, Executive Vice President - Planning and Networks, Vodafone Idea.

“Telecom is an enabler for many other industries - it reaches connectivity, it treats compute, it reaches intelligence too which can be consumed by a large number of industries and in that right telecom has got two important roles to play. Telecom is a consumer of technology but it is also an enabler,” said Agarwal.

One Deep Tech area that needs telecom to function effectively is IoT. “There are now sensors in smart campus, smart university, smart retail, smart warehouse, autonomous vehicles, heart meters, energy-meters, and so on. Sensors combined with intelligence are leading to completely new use cases. We need connectivity to keep it going,” added Agarwal.

“Telecom devices and SIMs play an important role in this as they are with a consumer 24/7. With the right permission that can create a huge amount of intelligence and information, which can reduce the cost of transactions,” he said while giving an example of how insurance companies can depend on the telecom sector in taking the right decision for customers.

“COVID-19 has challenged us but has also helped us innovate. India tends to be an important off-shoring center. Earlier what used to happen in peak over times is, suppose there is an important customer, they would have their server farms and they would be connected on MPLS links back to Bangalore and Hyderabad, and in the headquarters on the MPLS secured ring employees will do the offshore support. Now, those employees are not there in the office headquarters. They are at their booth and we need to reach this connectivity to them and to the customers at their home. Therefore, we need to provide very high-quality SLA and security,” said Agarwal.

“These could be very intense and bandwidth-consuming workloads, and therefore they need to be hosted at edge. So all of this is driving and accelerating innovation, which is around edge cloud and edge security, last-mile connectivity, network and security slices, and so on which we thought will take several years to come,” he added. Apart from the above the usage of cameras, sensors, analytics and drones in the telecom sector can save costs and increase efficiency, stated Agarwal.