An Interview with Protip Ghose, Vice President Sales & Marketing, Telsima

What R&D activity in WiMAX are you conducting in India?

Telsima has developed its lightweight network architecture and accompanying TRUFLE, T-STORM, & SMARTS technologies to enable fast, simple, and intelligent networks needed to deploy mobile multimedia on an international scale. These technologies work within the WiMAX standard to enable breakthroughs in cost, feature, and network resource management.

SMARTS Media Interleaving Management enables new revenue opportunities through the ability to achieve target advertising to specific audiences within video, voice, and data services; TRUFLE Mobility Management provides an inexpensive means to deliver 4G mobile, media rich services through lightweight network architecture; T-STORM Resource Management gives service providers the maximum return on their infrastructure investment through a control over their spectrum and network resources, allowing for Sector Scaling, D+E=>DualMode, and Spectral Resource Management.

What penetration can be expected for WiMAX (rural/urban) in the next 5 years?

The factors that currently hinder large scale deployment of WiMAX

Although WiMAX ecosystems are steadily being built by addressing technical challenges, and certification processes, yet the regulatory issues and spectrum allocations remain a problem. Currently the regulation treats a point to multipoint systems as a cluster of point to point systems and spectrum allocations and charges are decided accordingly rather than following the ubiquitous allocation pattern of 2G. Once these issues are fixed and adequate circle-wise spectrum is allocated to operators, we would see significantly large scale deployments.

On market trends expected in 2007 with reference to WiMAX technology

The year 2007 is being viewed as the inflection point in time for “real” WiMAX growth. Globally, the market seems healthy for WiMAX equipment and services. Service provider strategies and investment funds spent will begin to manifest more concretely through the buildup of a WiMAX subscriber base. The year will be the real test of how WiMAX will succeed in comparison to the market positioning that has taken place all this while. The wireless broadband infrastructure market in India is estimated to reach well over USD 1billion by the end of 2007 assuming the country sees 9 million broadband subscribers by 2007.

Currently, there are just around two million broadband subscribers in India. We expect it to grow to 20 million by 2010, of which 10 million will be wireless subscribers. If the capital expenditure per subscriber is estimated to be approximately USD 300, there is a wireless market of USD 3 billion waiting to be created and serviced.

 

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