• Last year,India emerged as the largest market for app downloadson the App Store and Google Play combined
• More than $60 billion has been invested in India’s internet startups in the past five years, with around $12 billion in 2020
• aloneIndia added 1600 new tech startups in 2020; more importantly, tech startups added a record number of unicorns last year

The above data indicates that India’s internet economy is on the cusp of massive growth and opportunities. One can only imagine its profound impact on the country’s economy and the number of jobs that will be created as a result of the growing digital ecosystem.

This also places a massive responsibility on India’s telecom industry. It is imperative that we provide an extremely robust and resilient digital backbone to power the next wave of digital transformation and allow our businesses to focus on innovation and growth.

There is little doubt that the Indian telecommunications industry has played a stellar role in the country’s growth over the last two decades. India’s telecommunications revolution is truly inspirational. More recently, the sector ensured business continuity for enterprises after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic last year as the normal way of life came to a standstill. Even so, what got us here is unlikely to take us further.

Today, the digital economy is becoming all-pervasive and Indian enterprises need an extremely robust and resilient network infrastructure designed for 100% uptime and low latency of less than one millisecond within key economic hubs. Unfortunately, present-day networks are not built to deliver this kind of network performance.

Fibre-powered growth

India Inc needs a fibre-powered network infrastructure that ensures the highest level of network performance without any quality or data loss. Fibre is crucial for carrying a vast amount of data over long distances. Moreover, it is key to providing bandwidth-hungry applications reliably. It is hardly surprising then that there is a direct correlation between fibre rollout and the GDP.

India’s current per capita fibre coverage is just 0.09 fibre km as against 0.87 km for China and 1.3 km for Japan and the US, according to the credit rating agency, ICRA.

Fibre rollouts in India don’t match the unprecedented surge in data consumption and the vision of Digital India. Further, the problem of rampant fibre cuts leads to frequent disruptions.

Challenging the status quo

At Lightstorm, we are building a world-class utility-grade fibre-based network that is specially designed to deliver a true B2B enterprise network experience. More than 92% of Lightstorm’s network uses a utility-grade fibre network enabling it to provide 100% uptime. The utility-grade infrastructure is not prone to problems like fibre cuts, thus ensuring extreme availability. This, coupled with the best DWDM technology, allows us to provision and scale our customers quickly on our network.

It may sound ironic, but we spent the first two years of our existence just understanding the network-related problems faced by enterprise customers. These insights helped us understand the shortcomings of the traditional ring-based network architecture, which is not geared to deliver the low latency required by several digital applications powered by the cloud and its use cases. To ensure that this is the case, we adopted point-to-point Linear routes and mesh architecture to provide the shortest latency between data centers within and across cities.

As India’s first carrier-neutral network infrastructure player, we have taken an unprecedented step to publish (on our website) the connected DC details and latency values across our network. This is our first crucial step towards providing complete transparency and, in turn, the control back in the hands of our customers.

There is an urgent need to reimagine our network architecture in line with the evolving requirements of the businesses. We have accepted the challenge and are redefining how networks are built to power future growth and take us closer to the vision of Digital India.