BPL Telecom offers Internet phone product

BANGALORE: BPL Telecom said on Monday it has launched a product to help firms

combine Internet data and telephone lines and price it competitively to take on

giant rivals like Cisco and Nortel.

The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) product, SNX 8500, would help

corporate customers cut costs by using their local switching equipment and the

Internet to make voice telephone calls and offer functions like messaging and

video streaming.

Officials of the company, 25 per cent of which is owned by electronics group

BPL Ltd. and the remainder by the Nambiar business family, said the new product

was 92 per cent software, giving the Bangalore-based firm a price edge.

While BPL's product would sell for Rs 2-3 million, equipment makers like

Cisco and Nortel had comparable products selling above Rs 3 million ($61,475),

they said. Rival firms used varying combinations of equipment and software, they

added.

"Increasingly, quality products are becoming more software intensive and

BPL Telecom is positioning itself in this space to export a large number of

value added software in the form of products," said the firm's managing

director Ranjit Shah. Shah said BPL Telecom was in talks to sell its product as

an add-on to bandwidth sales or equipment in the US market.

Shah told a news conference that BPL Telecom's 28,000 Indian switchboard

customers, who account for a third of the company's revenue, could potentially

be upgraded to the IP (Internet Protocol)-based products. India permitted

Internet telephony beginning this month.

Shah said the company, which had a 23 per cent share of India's corporate

switchboard market, expected the new product to account for at least a third of

the fresh revenue of the company in three years, by which time total revenue is

expected to touch 4.0 billion rupees from 1.5 billion in the year to March 2001.

Shah said the company had no plans now to list its stock or seek fresh funds.