'Cable digitisation, a huge opportunity for Cisco'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Networking giant Cisco sees huge business potential in India's digitised cable industry. And, it sees this scope not just in the major five metros of the country, but also in another 20 and odd tier 2 and tier 3 cities across India and thus is augmenting its Chennai facility in order to sustain this demand.

Sanjay Rohatgi, senior VP, service provider, Cisco India & SAARC, said: "Cable digitisation will address the digital divide in the country. How so ever, mobile, cable and fiber broadband will co-exist for a long time to come. People who were not able to use broadband for various reasons will no longer be bereft of it, once cable digitisation comes into place. This is a huge potential for our service provider (telecom) business."

The country has about 140 million TV home users, 115 cable and satellite users and 35 million DTH users.

He noted that the cable industry, which is divided among large cable service providers, multiple system operators (MSOs) and local cable operators (LCOs) will see consolidations in the near future and the major four or five MSOs will benefit out of this digitisation.

"The cable TV industry is very fragmented with only about 30 per cent of the head-ends belonging to corporate entities. Bulk of the service is given in analogue mode. There are 7,000 main head ends. less than 500 of these have access to digital signals today," Sanjay added.

The company is already in partnerships with cable service provider Asianet and Hathaway and Gujarat Telelinks Private Limited (GTPL).

The Indian Government's proposed pan India digitisation of cable network by 2014 will help cable operators in India to enable immersive experience such as HDTV, gaming, digital video recording, video-on-demand and future ‘connected home’ services to retail consumers.

Cisco already has several products and solutions, such as Cisco Cable Digital TV solutions, Cable Video, Cable Separable Security solutions and Cisco Videoscape, in its kitty in lieu with its digitisation plans. Recently it had also announced a wireless TV solution and an SD set-up-box (STB) and will soon announce a new high definition STB solution.