Tata Communications, a digital transformation and telecommunication services company said that it is expanding internet services to the enterprise sector worldwide including India, and together with software-defined Wide Area Network (SD WAN) enabling companies to make faster business-centric decisions.

"We are expanding our Internet services internationally, as well as in India to introduce broadband services. We are increasingly seeing people going to use a mix of hybrid network, which is broadband Internet plus multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and adoption of SD WAN as well allowing enterprises to make changes faster and monitor network performance," Song Toh, vice president, Global Network Services, Tata Communications told.

In January 2022, the company witnessed over 60% growth in the internet traffic on its network as compared to January 2020, and since the Covid outbreak, it has provisioned more than 22 Tbps of capacity in various segments across the internet network to cater to the traffic surge.

"The adoption of public cloud and secure access service edge (SASE) requires the enterprise network to be able to respond faster, and also lead a lot of enterprises to start adopting internet more broadly for enterprise connectivity," Toh said, adding that the the company is deploying automation onto its network to improve turn-around time.

The executive said that from a pure MPLS to adopting internet and broadband, there is still a mixed percentage as only a few enterprises see acceptance. "In some way, it's exactly what we as a managed service provider help our customers handle. They don't have to go hire 50 people to manage a network. With our network, enterprises can focus on the business systems to run an agile business."

The underlay layers into the network actually transport the traffic, and with MPLS that remain dominant, especially in India, enterprises have been transforming and adopting a lot more internet, according to him.

Tata Communications, a tier-1 internet service provider (ISP), has more than 30% of the global internet customer routes, and coupled with flagship SD WAN offering, provides agile, scalable, cloud-driven internet access services over 35 countries.

Cloud connectivity becomes increasingly important to enterprises that are essentially reducing their data center footprint.

"We are now also offering a local area network and Wi-Fi management service to meet customers' expectations," Toh added.

Future-proof solutions, according to the Mumbai-based company, need to encompass overlay intelligence and security, underlay performance and reliability, and value-added branch connectivity like software-defined network, SD-WAN, and Wi-Fi 6.

Ubiquitous connectivity, according to the Tata group company, is becoming more real as users are experiencing seamless connectivity from Wi-Fi to cellular networks, and that is expected to be optimised as fifth generation or 5G would be rolled out.