Telsima Targets 10 Mn WiMAX Users In India By 2010

With the recent $50 million funding, WiMAX provider Telsima is now gearing up for new customer acquisitions in India. Protip Ghosh, VP, Sales and Marketing - APAC, Telsima Communication elaborates on the company’s plan to tap the Indian WiMAX market.

How does Telsima plan to spend the $50 million funding?

Telsima is rapidly growing its customer base with commercial deployments in emerging markets such as India and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Based on innovative, high performing technologies, Telsima’s solutions break price-performance barriers, particularly suitable for emerging and rapidly growing markets. With several multi-million dollar contracts from Tier 1 operators, Telsima has proven that it understands the challenges and opportunities carriers face when deploying WiMAX networks. This funding will be invested in making product innovation and will help us achieve our mission of flagship telecom equipment company.

Could you elaborate on Telsima’s plans for the Indian WiMAX market?

The Indian market provides a broadband opportunity of approximately 50 million residential, 9000 large enterprise and 2 million SME consumers. Their paying abilities are approximately $15, $20 and $50 per month respectively. Hence we can expect that the Indian market has a potential to grow from under $2 billion today to over $12 billion in the next five years.

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Since Telsima treats India as its home market, our product roadmaps, features as well as price points are targeted to meet the business needs of the Indian operators. Our presence in India is probably the strongest amongst other vendors in terms of support.

The current requirement is skewered towards addressing the needs of delivering data over broadband that can easily be delivered via 802.16-2004 based networks using the available certified equipment. In India, the spectrum for WiMAX is currently not harmonised with rest of the world. In India the 3.3~3.4GHz band allocated to provide broadband wireless services can be used for WiMAX networks whereas the rest of the world is using 3.4~3.6GHz for WiMAX networks.

Despite the given challenges, Indian operators have started the commercial deployment of 802.16(d)-2004 based networks to grab the huge market opportunity. The market for mobile data services is waiting ahead. We all look forward to Mobile WiMAX while we are now deploying Fixed WiMAX.

Are you discussing with Indian operators for WiMAX roll out?

There are Tier I operator wins in India for Telsima which we would be announcing in the days to come. They are extremely significant to Telsima’s market presence not only in India but across the globe since they are one of the first few massive WiMAX standard ‘d’ commercial roll outs worldwide. We target 30 million users by 2010-11 worldwide, of which, 10 million users will be from India. 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. The wireless broadband infrastructure market in India is estimated to reach $1billion by the end of 2007 assuming the country sees 9 million broadband subscribers by 2007.

What are your offerings for telecom service providers?

There are a variety of software features for load alignment, load balancing etc. in our StarMAX line of WiMAX-based products which allow operators to start with low investments and grow as the subscribers grow. We have a very strong‘d’ to ‘e’ migration and coexistence story, which allows operators to start today and protect their investments for a long time even when ‘e’ technology comes in.

Telsima’s product portfolio consists of WiMAX Forum Certified Base Station and Subscriber Stations supported by market leading provisioning and network management software. Currently, Telsima products support 802.16-2004 standards. By early Q2 2007, Telsima will also have solutions supporting the 802.16-2005 standards, suitable for wave 1 certification. This will be followed by solutions supporting the Wave 2 certifications.