India is a fascinating place for telco operators. It’s home to more than a billion subscribers, while also having some of the lowest ARPU on the planet. This means mobile operators there not only need carrier-grade software products, they need to get them for a low, low price.
Last week I delivered a keynote at Voice & Data’s “5G and the future of mobile data” conference in Delhi, India. I’ve turned that talk into this podcast episode to share why the public cloud is perfect for India’s unique telco market and how to unlock its full potential. Listen now to hear:
Listen to the keynote by clicking play above and subscribe through your favorite podcast platform – see the links in the right column above.
The Telco in 20 podcast won a 2022 Gold Hermes Award and was recognized on Forrester’s 2021 list of the Top 100 Channel Podcasts and Feedspot’s Top 10 Telecom Podcasts list.
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India presents a unique combination of massive scale—over one billion subscribers—and some of the lowest ARPU on the planet, around $2 per user. The public cloud addresses both characteristics simultaneously: it can handle carrier-grade performance and scale, while delivering software at dramatically lower prices. As DR explains in her Delhi keynote, no other technology is positioned to meet both demands at once. Read more about why the public cloud is perfect for India.
Cloud washing happens when legacy software vendors rebrand existing products as “cloud native” without actually redesigning them for the public cloud—and without lowering their prices. Danielle Rios uses Amdocs as an example: despite marketing their products as cloud native on AWS Marketplace, all-in costs still work out to roughly $10 per subscriber. True cloud-native software should cost around 80% less than legacy alternatives. If the price hasn’t changed, the product probably hasn’t either.
Look at the price. Genuine cloud-native products, architected from the ground up for the public cloud, should cost roughly 80% less than legacy on-premise equivalents. If a vendor is calling its product cloud native but charging the same rates as before, that’s a red flag. DR recommends using price as a quick, practical test before signing any software agreement. Watch the full Voice & Data conference recording.
Seven years ago, there were no hyperscaler data centers in India. Today there are more than five data regions across cities including Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Delhi—representing billions of dollars of investment by the hyperscalers. The fact that AWS was a lead sponsor at the Voice & Data 5G conference is itself a signal of how dramatically the landscape has shifted.
Totogi is DR’s cloud-native telco software company, built from the ground up for the public cloud. Unlike legacy vendors whose pricing remains largely unchanged despite cloud rebranding, Totogi’s starting price is one cent per subscriber—illustrating what genuinely cloud-native architecture can deliver in terms of cost efficiency. Totogi is available for purchase on AWS Marketplace.
India recently completed a record-breaking 5G spectrum auction, and because 5G was designed to be cloud native, operators can build out their new networks using truly cloud-native software from the start. DR sees this as a rare opportunity for Indian telcos to dramatically lower IT CapEx and OpEx—rather than defaulting to the same legacy vendors that are simply calling their old products cloud native.
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