| |June 20219products and last mile access products. HFCL also adopted the remote working culture well in time to abide by the COVID appropriate behavior and has continued to operate its offices and plants within the frame work of rules and regulations disseminated by the respective authorities from time to time. Appropriate measures to ensure that spread of COVID is prevented in the plants by regulating strength, sanitization of work spaces, remote working as far as possible, periodic health checks and COVID tests of employees and many other initiatives were taken to keep the business operations continued. HFCL's R&D teams at various centers in the country, utilized the period for driving enhanced efforts into design and development of several new innovative products that would contribute to the evolved connectivity and throughput needs. HFCL has increased production of the FTTX cables to meet the increased demand and is one of the top manufacturers of such cables in India. We also increased the production of the WIFI Access Points and Unlicensed Band Radio for meeting the increased demand. We have done as high as 1, 50,000 units of sale of these products in the last one year plus period, which is a significant number for any of the world renowned brands in WIFI and UBR space. New Opportunities In The Industry We all know the huge potential 5G has in ushering in a high speed connectivity revolution into the cellular networks. This is expected to be in deployment in our country within next one year say by mid of 2022. Broadly speaking, 5G is going to create a huge market for machine to machine communication and open up a large market for IOT devices and related services. User experience for cellular users is going to be pushed upwards due to high download and upload speeds, high quality of service in terms of committed bandwidth coupled with low latencies. The huge increase in the number of user equipment will provide a large scope for online services and e-businesses including a large play into vehicle to infrastructure (V2X) that will emerge and generate huge allied businesses. Online application will see a upwards growth trajectory due to increased demand from human and machine users. There will be growing demand for security in the end devices and the networks due to increased traffic and transactions. Managed services will also find increased customers. Big Data handling will be inescapable and the resultant environment will push for greater and deeper engagement of AI and ML technologies into several walks of life. This will also provide for a new life line to the Telco companies to generate more revenue from increased connections and higher data consumption as data will be the new gold. The infrastructure companies like OFC manufacturers, Antenna companies, Network and RF cable companies, System integration companies will have renewed business opportunities due to expansion in the 5G infrastructure of various Telcos. Overall outlook for 5G is very promising not only for the Telcos but also for all the associated providers and user ecosystem.Technology Road MapI am proud to state that HFCL is a technology intensive product and services company. We are very much aware of the prevalent situation and undertaking important steps to create products and technologies that are going to help immensely in the digital transformation by organizations. Our technology roadmap is catering for developments that are driving the following aspects for the stake holders in the Telecom and Networking industry:-1. Adoption of high bandwidth and high throughput technology based solution offerings.2. Easy to use product configurations involving programmability, network orchestration, ZTP (Zero Touch Provisioning) and new age cloud technologies.3. Consumer friendly self-help portals for issue resolution involving Chatbots, AI, ML and Deep learning based intuitive day 1 and day 2 support.4. High efficiency and high reliability based wireless access and backhaul systems with advanced spectrum usage and interference cancellation techniques.5. Access and Core network products for next generation networks in fixed line and wireless space.6. High end AI/ML and Deep learning based software with advanced analytics for enabling security and surveillance applications.HFCL is committed to the digital India drive through initiatives to design, develop, manufacture and deploy high technology based innovative Telecom gear in the country, which is in line with the honorable Prime Minister's vision of `Atmanirbhar Bharat' through Make In India. Our technologies are being developed within country for the entire spectrum of Telecom applications for Telcos, Railway, Defense and Homeland security. Shiv Kumar Singh, Senior Vice President
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