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US telecom start-up enters India

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE: Qualcomm and Gururaj Deshpande funded Airvana, builder of telecom infrastructure for the CDMA market, has set up a development center in Bangalore to tap into the Indian engineering talent and the ever-growing mobile customer base in Asia Pacific.






The four-year start-up brings out a third generation CDMA product based on evolution-data optimized (EV-DO) radio access network technology. This product, which is an EV-DO card module, goes into CDMA base stations.





EV-DO technology, considered a rival to enhanced data rates for GSM evolution (EDGE), is a 3G standard that enhances data speeds similar to broadband wireless. Data rates can be as high as 2.4 mbps, enabling easier multimedia messaging, Internet and video clips over mobile networks.





"Airvana's Bangalore team currently has 25 members which would increase to around 60 by end of 2005," informed the company's India operations director Shantigram Jagannath. "The team would be involved in core development on the embedded side such as EMS and NMS. The Indian center has also been strategically positioned to tap the incredible mobile customer base in APAC. We are also in discussions with CDMA players like Reliance and Tata Indicom," he added.





Elaborating on the kind of applications that could be added on with EV-DO technology, Jagannath said, "It would be possible to have VoIP and real time video conferencing on mobiles."





Airvana has OEM partnerships with Nortel and Ericsson and has managed to get gain traction with carriers such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint in the US. Though the company has managed to attract GSM customers like Eurotel in the Czech Republic, its primary focus is the CDMA market, which has a potential of $220 million to $230 million.





Started with an investment of $100 million, the company has been cash positive for the last four quarters.
















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