Kaitki Aggarwal, Co-founder and Vice-President, Development, Parallel Wireless

Kaitki Aggarwal co-founded Parallel Wireless after having worked with technology gi­ants such as Starent (now part of Cisco), Lucent/Bellabs, Cedarpoint, and Tellabs for over 20 years. A technology ve­­teran, she has worked on several communications technologies including Wi-Fi ac­­cess gateway, LTE circuit switch fallback, multimedia core and datapath localisation. She has more than 20 patents pending in the US.

At Parallel Wireless, she leads the product development and execution of world-first solutions. With projects and trials across six continents, she ensures the delivery of quality products and has extensive experience in the wireless, wireline and cable industries.

“Parallel Wireless was formed with the objective of making cellular networks more efficient. We are trying to solve real-world problems. It is for this reason that buzzwords are not very important for us. When everybody else is fo­cu­sed on 5G, we recently added 2G capability to our end-to-end SDR solution since we believe that the technology will be relevant for some more time and we can add more efficiency with our solution.”

Aggarwal believes that operators will now start focusing on rural users as the market has be­come lucrative with innovative products that red-uce the cost of setting up and managing networks. “Govern­­ment in­i­tiatives will also help in bridging the digital divide,” she says. She foresees increa-sed adoption of virtualisation by operators, especially given the hypercompetitive environ-me­nt. It will also help operators prepare their networks for the era of connected things.

While Aggarwal has wor­ked on several interesting projects, ranging from air interface to voice and packet core, the most memorable one has been her leading a team of architects and software developers in India for multimedia core development. “We work­ed on different challenging problems and positioned the product in some very demanding customer networks. It was a great experience to see the team working through challenges, finding solutions and making it a success,” she says.

Aggarwal has an MBA fr­om Babson College, USA, and a bachelor’s in computer science from IIT Roorkee, where she met her husband.  Her mother has had a significant impact on her. “She ran a small business from home to take care of expenses for my education and ensured that my drea­ms were not curtailed due to  lack of resources. What I am today would not have been possible without my parents’ support,” she says.