On your market strategy for India

Telsima's vision is to deliver technological breakthroughs that accelerate the delivery of broadband across India and leverage this success to build an India-based global telecom equipment franchise. Unlike major countries that have spawned incumbent equipment manufacturers, addressing their home needs, such as Sweden, Finland, Germany, France, China, or the US, the rapidly expanding Indian telecom market has yet to benefit from its own domestic world-class telecom equipment manufacturers and solutions providers. Armed with world class technologies that are relevant to the needs of network operators in the emerging markets, Telsima is well on its way to filling this void.

To meet its vision, Telsima has brought together the best engineering resources from around the world-
experts in the area of network architecture, RF design, system architecture, network management, embedded solutions, software development, quality assurance, and manufacturing. The company has an extremely experienced team drawn from India, Europe and the USA, employing over 350 people globally. The company is backed by leading Silicon Valley investors and other strategic partners.

On your products and solutions

Access based on copper or fiber in emerging markets does not allow the operator to roll out the network fast and grow on subscriber base to keep pace with the growth requirement of the GDP. Taking cue from the growth of voice network in the past 10 years, the driver for WiMAX adoption has been the availability of a wireless standard based technology at an affordable price. India has the opportunity to benefit from most advanced broadband mobile standard. Mobile WiMAX in the 2.5 and/or 2.3 GHz IMT bands is the most widely adopted global band and now potential WiMAX operators in India would be able to invest in this standard band exploiting global scales of economy to suit the best business models to offer affordable mobile broadband services in India. With our StarMAX range of Wave II certified products and solutions, Indian operators have the chance to transform narrowband mobile networks to broadband mobile networks, mobile users to broadband mobile users as well as to increase the broadband and internet penetration rates. Mobile WiMAX supports countries seeking cost effective, high performance, fast, and easy to deploy broadband access networks, products, and applications. We believe users should have access to affordable broadband mobile Internet services and thus pave the way for increased GDP as BB penetration has a definite relation to increase in GDP.

On your products' technological advantages

Telsima has adopted only standards-based technology and has a certified portfolio of products that meet the operator's needs. Telsima solutions bring to subscribers quality broadband connections and support applications today, while providing investment security and a migration path for the future.

Telsima belongs to an elite corps of vendors that have WiMAX Forum certified products and offers the most comprehensive certified technology portfolio for enterprise, residential, and portable/mobile deployments. We are among the first few vendors to achieve certification for end-to-end, MIMO enabled, 2.5 GHz mobile WiMAX system. Our Tier 1 operator-proven, market leading, and award-winning 802.16d-2004 WiMAX certified product portfolio with built-in mobility is now complemented by its 802.16-2005 WiMAX certified mobile systems. Telsima's innovations allow operators to offer scalable mobile services with MIMO antenna diversity and NWG ASN solutions. Telsima's StarMAX 6000 base stations' scalable blade architecture delivers the performance required for Mobile WiMAX infrastructure, with MIMO technologies, and supports the mobile triple play services of 4G environments. The company's IEEE 802.16e-2005 mobile station meets the operators' full mobility WiMAX service needs. Telsima's distributed ASN-GW solution enables service providers to address the customers' mobility needs including metro-mobility and roaming. Telsima has an unmatched roadmap for 16e and mobile solutions.

Telsima has a large R&D base in Bangalore and the software for our products and solutions is developed out of this base. Besides Bangalore, Telsima does its R&D in the Silicon Valley (network architecture) and in Slovenia (microwave engineering). In the StarMAX line of products, there are a variety of innovative software features for load alignment, load balancing, etc. that allow operators to start with low investments and grow as the subscribers grow.

On your patents, licenses, or similar copyrights

Our company's philosophy is to drive technological differentiation, while remaining interoperable and standards based, to create value for itself. It is a part of all the major fora governing the development of standards. This gives a platform for Telsima to express views and address technological gaps.

We have a very effective architecture team which files patents and ensures that intellectual property rights are fully protected. The team also ensures while designing the system architecture to protect the company from any litigation on IPR grounds. Telsima has developed an extensive patent portfolio in Mobile WiMAX (27 patents: 11 filed, 16 applications in process).

On benefits of your WiMAX service offerings

WiMAX offers the lowest cost alternative for BWA for enterprise broadband connectivity through a range of devices like WiMAX embedded notebooks, USB dongles, PCMCIA cards, indoor and outdoor CPEs for segments like sales force automation, banking and financial services, manufacturing sector, travel, and tourism sector.

On future of WiMAX services in India

2009 would be the year for WiMAX network rollouts to commence in 2.5 and 2.3GHz bands in India by leading operators. We expect WiMAX to contribute for broadband subscriber growth significantly with at least 10 million subscribers to be added by 2012.

On key growth drivers in India

Traditionally, Internet access has been the main driver for bandwidth demand. Exporters and software development houses have also been big bandwidth consumers till date in India. Off late, enterprise users, consumers, service providers, and the government are beginning to demand bandwidth on tap. In India, the next growth in the broadband market is going to come from three major sources: the emerging middle class with no broadband access, the existing pool of dial-up Internet users, and businesses, particularly SMEs that roll out mobile data applications. Broadly, bandwidth guzzlers who will demand broadband and lead to its massive growth can be:

• Entertainment and distance education: Already making strong business case for broadband.
• Operators: Live webcasts of events through data networks, interactive classroom sessions, online gaming, rich multimedia content, and video.
• Network convergence: It is pushing broadband growth. Voice, video, and data are beginning to be pushed along the same pipe; bandwidth requirements are thus soaring. As connectivity costs are dropping, enterprises are considering a common network for voice, video, and data. The real attraction here is the huge cost-saving. 
• Business growth: Large enterprises, especially in the banking and finance sector, are opting for more bandwidth to fulfill growing business requirements. Heavy messaging and core applications use a lot of bandwidth. At present SMEs use ‘thin' bandwidth because applications like VPN, ERP, CRM, and SCM don't require high bandwidth. Ninety percent of VSATs use 64Kbps or less. These are all low-bandwidth applications that are manageable within 128Kbps. However, bandwidth requirements till recent times have been low because companies have not yet combined video, audio, and data on their networks. Now that corporates are converging their applications and are upgrading capacities on their networks, they will become the main demand drivers.
• VoIP in rural areas: Service providers are moving toward all IP networks. VoIP will add to the voice connectivity needs in a complementary manner. In the foreseeable future, mobility through cellular services will not only be overtaken by VoIP but will also be complemented in areas which are still under-served.