Rahul Pandey, Managing Director, Sales and Marketing, UTStarcom India
Rahul Pandey, MD, sales and marketing, UTStarcom India, has over 17 years of experience in sales, marketing and business development. He joined UTStarcom, a global telecom infrastructure provider, in 2005, and has since then played an instrumental role in driving the company’s operations in the Indian market.
UTStarcom offers carrier-class broadband transport and access (Wi-Fi and fixed line) products and solutions that are optimised for mobile backhaul, metro aggregation, broadband access and Wi-Fi data offloading. Its clients include some of the largest telecom players in the country and it has also recently started domestic manufacturing of its products.
Among his most successful assignments, Pandey recalls an upgrade programme that UTStarcom carried out for BSNL. “The project entailed migrating BSNL’s existing PSTN/ISDN customers to the next-generation network to enable supplementary services using internet protocol along with basic telephony.”
On the current trends in the telecom sector, Pandey says that the rapid deployment of cloud services, video streaming and other bandwidth-hungry applications, as well as the growing popularity of smart mobile devices are driving explosive growth in data traffic. “Being one of the fastest growing big economies and the second largest telecom market in the world, India is experiencing rapid growth in data consumption. 4G networks have become commonplace, making India the third largest market for 4G handsets worldwide. At the same time, carrier Wi-Fi networks are playing a more significant role, catering to the majority of the wireless traffic globally,” he says.
However, one of the major challenges that operators are facing today, says Pandey, is the serious imbalance between growing the volume of traffic and saturated ARPUs and declining profitability. “In order to be profitable, they must stand out in the market with the most advanced and creative service offerings and attractive pricing.”
Further, Pandey feels that the adoption of new technologies like IoT and M2M will bring about a change in requirements in terms of very low latency, high service availability, energy efficiency, etc. While the coming of 5G in 2020 will address these issues, a change in backhaul and aggregation network technologies is also called for to support such low latency and other needs.
Pandey has an MBA with a specialisation in marketing and finance from CSJM University, Kanpur.
