LSI bullish on India's wireless growth

BANGALORE, INDIA: Jim Anderson, senior VP,  Networking Components Division, LSI Corporation, says: “Indian market is an important market for us especially because of the new network build-out that is happening in the wireless infrastructure space. The company has been growing its presence in India pretty rapidly over the past few years and will continue to do so.”

The company recently divested its storage systems arm Engenio to NAS provider NetApp, so that it can increase its focus on semiconductor space.

Also Read: LSI elevates Jeff Richardson as COO

Jim, in an interview with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL, shares his views about the wireless trends and what excites him about Indian telecom industry. Excerpts:

CIOL: How was 2010 for LSI Networking?

Jim Anderson: 2010 was a very big year for LSI. In 2010, LSI's networking business saw a good growth and posted a revenue of a just a little less than half a billion dollar.

In terms of our major investments area, the revenue grew by over 50 per cent in 2010 as compared to 2009.

One of the areas where we particularly saw growth was communication processors, where the volume doubled year-over-year.

Last year we sampled 20 different component networking SoCs for our customers including standard and custom products.

We estimate that there is a $3 billion worth market opportunity in wireless and enterprise space.

CIOL: What were the factors that caused such high growth?

Jim: LSI's product line spans across communication processors, media processors, content and inspection processors and custom ASIC.

Customers are today looking for products with low power, cost and high performance. One of the areas where our communication processors, called ACPs, are used is in wireless applications, and wireless access points.

From service providers' perspective, number of devices, such as smartphones, iPads, iPhones, that are connecting to wireless access network are increasing by large numbers. Ericsson, in a study, finds that by the end of the decade about 50 billion devices will be connected to wireless network.

Moreover, today mobile phones are not merely used to send text message or make calls, but to access rich media content through real time video download, video streaming etc.

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From an enterprise perspective, trends such as telepresence, video conferencing are being increasingly adopted by companies to stay connected. This is turn is driving a large amount of of traffic through the network.

CIOL: So what are the challenges that it is bringing and how are you helping service providers to overcome them?

Jim: All the above said factors are causing a lot of bandwidth pressure on wireless networks. Thus, a lot of new network build-outs are happening in India to support this kind of rapid growth, which will continue for few more years to come.

LSI DSP media processor is used for video and voice transcoding purpose and it supports multi-radio networks.

Our content processors have the capability to do deep packet inspection, thus help analyze traffic that goes into the network and our custom solutions are made to order for a particular customer.

Thus our products help the service providers to roll out networks efficiently and with built-in intelligence.

CIOL: Are the present telecommunication network infrastructure in the country insufficient to cater to such growth?

Jim: Yes, present network can not handle the traffic that would be there in three to ten years from now. It has to be re-architected to handle the rapid growth efficiently.

One of the things with LTE is its vastness. In traditional 2G or 3G network, the fundamental architecture of the network will be hierarchal. With LTE the network becomes more vast and distributive because it scales more rapidly. So re-architecting is necessary.