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| According
to Narayanan, the market is ripe for IP-based solutions
and the returns will be rewarding |
MRO-Tek,
a manufacturer and marketer of network accesses devices and
last mile products, plans to target the service provider market
with a range of new IP-based products. These new products,
the company says, will help it earn Rs 30 crore from this
market.
The company plans to introduce a new IP-based product range
utilising Compressed Voice technology supporting up to 360
voice channels over an E1 line and 288 over a T1 as against
the conventional 24 or 30 voice circuits normally available
using traditional voice equipment.
This
is ten times as efficient as the traditional method. S Narayanan,
CMD, MRO-Tek, says, “DoT has already slashed call rates
and it is anybody’s guess as to whether the number of
calls will go up drastically. This means that cellular operators
will need to invest further in backbone infrastructure. But
with compressed voice, they don’t need to make additional
investments. Return-on-Investment (RoI) time for a 2 Mbps
connection will be three months. For 64 Kbps, RoI will be
immediate. Our strategy will be to target service providers
and carriers like Bharti and Reliance.”
The second product will be a last mile end-to-end IP product
supporting all protocols ATM, Frame Relay and IP. Currently,
products such as these cost $2000 per port. Service providers
will be able to offer multiple services over a unified IP
infrastructure, by integrating the most comprehensive set
emerging service capabilities including leased line, frame
relay, ATM, circuit switched voice, VoIP, intelligent VPN
and Internet traffic. Narayanan says manufacturing the product
locally can help bring down the cost to a mere $200 per port.
The third product will involve manufacturing fractional converters
and upgradation of modems from HDSL to G.SHDSL (IP-based).
The company plans to market its products in the overseas market.
To this end it has set up an office in Singapore with an investment
of 100,000 Singapore dollars. The Singapore office will give
the company the much needed access to other A-PAC markets.
MRO will provide design engineering and consultancy in the
networking area. “Singapore will be a hardware body shopping
centre. We are currently in talks with eight customers in
the airline, finance and oil and gas sectors. We are expecting
healthy revenues from this market next year,” says Narayanan.
MRO plans to develop products that can measure Quality of
Service (QoS) for data services in the future. TRAI’s
new ruling, ‘Service Level Agreement’, has made
it mandatory for companies to show maximum uptime or payback
their customers. Narayanan says a lot of R&D effort will
be required to develop this kind of product.
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