The Indian telecom market is unlike any other in the world. It has:

• Unmatched growth (up to 20 million new mobile connections each month)
• An enormous untapped market, in that only 61 percent of its growing and increasingly affluent 1.2 billion population has any kind of voice connection
• An amazing hunger for mobile services
• A political and regulatory environment that is so unpredictable, almost anything could happen tomorrow

All of which adds up to an exciting, yet potentially perilous, market for telecom systems vendors looking to sell their wares to India's network operators.

So when the Light Reading team visited the India Telecom 2010 show in New Delhi recently, we weren't really sure what to expect. Would the event reflect the market, and be completely different from anything else in the world?

So we took our camera along to snap what we saw on the show floor. Click on any of the photos below to start the slideshow and use the arrows above each pic to navigate:

The show certainly had some different types of companies -- including a few with, er, very interesting names -- and at times seemed to be dominated by mobile service providers and central office power generators. But there were also some of the more regular names, such as Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. , Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT), Nokia Networks , and Samsung Corp. , though, notably, Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) and ZTE Corp. (Shenzhen: 000063; Hong Kong: 0763) were conspicuous by their absence.

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading