Sudhir Kunder, Country Director, DE-CIX India
DE-CIX India provides premium network interconnection services and operates several carrier and data centre-neutral internet exchanges, domestically and globally. In an interview with tele.net, Sudhir Kunder, country director, DE-CIX India, talks about the impact of 5G in India, the concept of digital triangle technologies, and the company’s future strategies. Edited excerpts…
What are your views on India’s evolving digital landscape? What impact will 5G have on it?
In the last three years, the way India has accelerated on the digital bandwagon is unprecedented. 5G has been a blessing at the right time. We will see accelerated 5G deployment not just in the mobility segment, but in the enterprise segment as well, where 5G will make investments more easily monetisable. 5G allows for lower latency and higher transmission speeds. It is a game-changer in terms of the amount of data that can be transmitted over a mobile network, as well as the number of devices that can be connected. 5G can enable peak data rates of up to 20 GBPS, with up to 1 million devices connected per km, and data transmission is highly reliable, with a latency as low as one millisecond. Its use cases are visible to businesses and can be utilised beyond theory and proof of concept. Using 5G to accelerate digital transformation and make India a digital hub will be the trend in the future.
What have been the key operational highlights for DE-CIX over the past year? What are its key focus areas in the Indian market?
In the last three years, things that we did included bringing ease of doing business into play, understanding the landscape in which we are operating, by not adding or subtracting manpower. We were able to transform DE-CIX India into a numero uno company, particularly in terms of maintaining our leadership in Mumbai as Asia Pacific’s largest internet exchange amongst 153 exchanges in 29 countries and DE-CIX India as the country’s largest internet exchange. We have been able to extend ease of doing business beyond our ISP customers. Many enterprises have been able to use DE-CIX’s interconnection platform to further their digital transformation journeys and ramp up cloud deployment, with multi-cloud strategies. Moreover, we were the first organisation to have a single access number for all our customer touchpoints. We have also partnered with several organisations with similar mindsets. We partnered with Lightstorm Capital Ventures in January 2022. With this partnership, we will now cover a further 22 additional data centres where Lightstorm has a presence.
How does 5G address business needs?
India does not have much legacy infrastructure. This is an advantage for the country, as it can quickly deploy new technology or infrastructure. Since there are models that are already available across the globe, it is easy for India to quickly learn a technology and implement it across the small and medium businesses (SMBs) and enterprise spaces, where there is a lot of headroom for technology adoption. Data churning and transfer across points will need not only 5G, but also technologies such as machine learning, AI and IoT.
What are your views on the concept of digital triangle? How do you plan to leverage it?
In DE-CIX, the digital triangle incorporates AI, IoT and 5G, which are already getting deployed. The sum of these technologies will be greater than the benefit of one. A manufacturing and distribution organisation can use a combination of these three technologies, but it will need a place where the amalgamation can happen. This is where an interconnection platform like DE-CIX comes into play. 5G, IoT and AI, deployed at the edge, will generate significant business case adoption, not only for manufacturing and distribution but also other industries. Globally, European players are providing solutions to organisations where DE-CIX’s interconnection platform can be effectively used to combine this digital triangle. Thus, while having only one piece might be great, having a combination of all three pieces, orchestrated in the right fashion, will not only help a company take that particular segment to the next level, but also accelerate growth due to improved deployment and greater agility.
What are DE-CIX’s targets/strategies for the next three years?
- Maintaining a robust and scalable platform,
- Accelerating presence within other metros in India,
- Launching cutting-edge technologies such as Microsoft Azure Peering Services, which is likely to be announced soon,
- Launching anywhere-to-anywhere data availability.
In addition, we intend to launch at least two services immediately after the launch of MAPS. We also want to venture into the enterprise segment within the next six months. We should become more reachable for the entire spectrum of SMBs and enterprises in India in the coming two years. Further, we will continue to focus on customer engagement and ecosystem-driven education initiatives. With this, we will be able to help the large community of techies in the ISP domain understand the power of peering.
