In this exclusive interaction, Ved Antani explains why Indian telecom providers struggle with frequent outages amid massive scale, rising demand, and complex network environments. He highlights how AI-driven, agentic observability is becoming essential for ensuring round-the-clock uptime, improving customer experience, and supporting the growth of India’s rapidly expanding digital economy.
IT Voice- Why are Indian telecom service providers struggling to maintain uptime?
Ved Antani- Recent research shows that 57% of telcos face high-business-impact outages at least once a week, indicating that there is growing demand for their services, but that infrastructure is growing slowly. At a global level, network failures, third-party or cloud-provider dependencies, and growing cybersecurity risks are the cause of such outages. In India, these challenges are amplified by the sheer scale of demand. Because we have one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing digital user bases, it’s common to experience congestion, especially in areas where backhaul capacity or tower density haven’t kept pace with demand. Such demand, combined with fragile infrastructure, third-party dependencies and cyber threats can make high uptime an ongoing challenge.
IT Voice- Why is monitoring telecom networks in India such a huge challenge?
Ved Antani- India is the world’s second-largest telecom market, with more than 1.2 billion subscribers spread across diverse geographies, usage patterns and network conditions. This scale alone creates a massive monitoring challenge. The volume of users generates constant traffic spikes and overstretched bandwidth, making it challenging for operators to detect performance issues early. These looming issues give rise to congestion, slowdowns, and outages that often surface before they can be proactively addressed.
Another layer of complexity comes from the coexistence of legacy 4G infrastructure and next-generation 5G networks. Managing two generations of technology side-by-side requires advanced traffic orchestration, seamless interoperability, and precise handovers. When handovers fail or network slicing isn’t optimised, it directly impacts service quality, causing drops in speed, latency issues, and even localised outages.
Monitoring becomes even trickier as India’s telecom infrastructure varies depending on where in the country you are. Dense urban clusters, remote rural regions, variable fibre penetration, and thousands of distributed towers and backhaul points create a fragmented environment where real-time visibility is difficult to maintain.
Intelligent monitoring systems are the best way to steer clear of these recurring issues. It can analyse traffic patterns, predict failures, and flag anomalies before they escalate. It ensures uptime, lower operational costs, and a seamless customer experience.
IT Voice- What is the role of intelligent observability in ensuring outages don’t occur?
Ved Antani- Intelligent observability is becoming pivotal for telecom providers to prevent outages and maintain service reliability. Telcos are investing in AI-driven monitoring faster than any other sector, with 74% having already adopted AI monitoring, far ahead of the global cross-industry average of 54%. As the cost of failure soars —averaging $2 million per hour, service providers are increasingly embracing intelligent observability to ensure system stability. 58% already see a 2x or greater ROI from observability investments, with 10% reporting returns as high as 5–10x.
This level of investment is essential because network failures, infrastructure fragility, third-party dependencies, and cyber threats make high uptime difficult to maintain. Intelligent observability helps telcos counter these risks by offering a unified, real-time view of their entire digital estate, spanning applications, network layers, services, devices, and traffic flows.
By leveraging capabilities such as real user monitoring (RUM), browser monitoring, mobile monitoring, and synthetic testing, telcos can detect anomalies early, predict performance degradation, and respond right in time. This proactive prevention ensures that small problems are contained before they trigger large-scale outages. Intelligent observability gives telcos the situational awareness and predictive intelligence needed to keep networks stable and ensure a seamless customer experience.
IT Voice- Why is offering around-the-clock uptime necessary for India’s digital economy?
Ved Antani- India’s digital economy is expected to contribute 20% of the country’s GDP over the next decade, driven by the Digital India mission, rapid broadband expansion, and the nationwide rollout of 5G. These advancements are enabling smart cities, IoT ecosystems, digital public infrastructure, and other connected services. For this growth to continue and scale, uninterrupted, high-quality telecom services are essential.
Today, every major sector, including digital payments, telemedicine, e-commerce, remote work, and government services, depends on stable connectivity. Even localised downtime disrupts economic activity, social services, and e-governance operations. As digitisation deepens across states and union territories, the availability and quality of telecom networks become foundational to economic resilience, inclusive growth, and citizen empowerment.
IT Voice- How can agentic AI-integrated observability solutions help telecom providers offer better digital customer experiences?
Ved Antani- Agentic AI–integrated observability helps telecom providers deliver better digital customer experiences through real-time intelligence and automated action. Instead of simply detecting issues, it continuously observes how customers interact across devices, networks, and applications and then takes proactive steps to prevent disruptions before they occur.
These solutions bring together real user monitoring (RUM), including browser and mobile monitoring, with synthetic monitoring to give providers a complete view of digital performance. RUM shows exactly how customers experience the network in real time, while synthetic tests simulate user journeys to detect problems early, even before customers are affected. Combined with AI-driven anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, and automated remediation, providers can resolve performance issues faster and with far greater accuracy.
Agentic AI–driven observability empowers providers to maintain high performance and deliver consistently seamless digital experiences that customers expect.
IT Voice- Why is intelligent observability an absolute necessity for telecom providers
Ved Antani- Outages cost telecom businesses an average of $2 million per hour, meaning even brief disruptions can trigger significant financial loss and customer churn. Intelligent observability gives providers the real-time visibility, predictive insights, and automated analysis needed to maintain uptime, essential for curbing outage-related losses and ensuring seamless customer experiences.
Beyond preventing outages, observability supports the outcomes telcos value most. For executives, the key benefits fall into two areas: achieving business KPIs and meeting technical KPIs such as lower MTTR, higher throughput, and reduced incident volumes. For on-ground practitioners, observability boosts day-to-day productivity by accelerating issue identification and resolution while reducing guesswork across increasingly complex, distributed environments.
These operational gains translate into measurable improvements. Telcos report better system uptime (38%) and improved developer productivity (32%) as the most direct results of adopting intelligent observability. As networks expand and architectures become more intricate, intelligent observability is becoming foundational to telco reliability in a high-demand digital ecosystem.
