Even as telecom service providers enable the digital transformation of the enterprises, they themselves need to transform their networks to power the next wave of digital transformation and prepare the networks for faster technology cycles and meet the ever-growing demands of the customers.

Today, businesses need a network that provides 100% uptime and ensures extremely low latency of less than one millisecond within major economic hubs. Increasingly, companies now use the cloud for many business processes and enterprise applications. Further, they want to exploit the new-age technologies, like real-time analytics, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and the Internet of Things (IoT), to bring new offerings and gain a business edge.

Unfortunately, this is not often possible in emerging markets because the telecom networks were not originally designed for this kind of requirement. Lack of quality fibre network coupled with legacy hardware-centric equipment and network architecture is a bottleneck and prevents Communication Service Providers (CSPs) from addressing the always-on, hyper bandwidth requirements of the digital enterprises.

At Lightstorm, we decided to adopt a design-first approach to address these issues and build a robust network geared to address the present and future requirements of the enterprises. Instead of going to our customers with a pre-designed solution, we decided to reverse the process by spending time with them to understand their needs better and then developing a solution accordingly. This novel approach ensures that what we offer is dynamically different from what is available in the market today.

Here are some elements of our network which demonstrate how our solution is designed to address the needs of growing India:

• A crucial need of Indian businesses is 100% uptime. More than 90% of our long-haul fibre routes use OPGW/Utility infrastructure, ensuring no disruption because of fibre cuts.
• Typically, the service providers use a ring-based network architecture, which cannot provide the extremely low latency required by several digital applications and tools. On the other hand, Lightstorm uses a point-to-point mesh architecture to provide the shortest latency between datacenters within and across cities. The network is designed to deliver the most demanding Service Level Agreements (SLA) terms.
• Further, our point-to-point mesh network is supported by a leaf and spine network architecture which is self-healing powered by an intelligent ASON (Automatically Switched Optical Network). This allows us to build resilience in the network by providing two or three completely diverse paths from any data centre.
• Businesses today demand openness, transparency and control. We, at Lightstorm, provide control and complete end-to-end visibility to the customer. It comes with several functionalities, including on-demand provisioning, SLA metrics and a dashboard for effective and easy management of the network infrastructure. Further, we published on our website the connected DC details and latency values across our network. This is the first and crucial step towards providing control back in the hands of the customers.
• Last but not least, we are India’s first carrier-neutral infrastructure company. This way, we ensure that the customers benefit from diversity, better cost economics and greater flexibility.

For enterprises to capture the opportunities in the digital economy, it is imperative to address the gaps in the infrastructure. Reliable, agile and scalable state-of-the-art communications networks designed especially for enterprises is the need of the hour. At Lightstorm, we endeavour not only to fill this gap but also to set new benchmarks for quality, thereby opening new opportunities for our customers.