''Wireless is a growing market in India''

Bob Friday is the worldwide director of engineering for wireless at Cisco Systems. In an interview with Pragati Simlote of CyberMedia News he gave an idea of direction to the Wireless initiatives in the market outlining the advantages of the Cisco go to market model for wireless.

He also shed light on Cisco’s wireless plans in the service provider, government and defense verticals especially in the area of outdoor wireless.

What kind of wireless initiatives is Cisco undertaking?

We want to participate in the wireless revolution that is about to happen in India. We are trying to look at how we can participate in working with the government and other agencies, and bring in the value of networks as not point products but as end-to-end solutions.

From that standpoint one of the key components of the solutions approach is obviously wireless both from a standpoint of connectivity, which is required in cities - point to multipoint connectivity - or connectivity for some of the large projects that are happening in the government. These projects may vary around setting up of hotspots, rural broadband infrastructure for village connectivity as well as setting up of citywide municipal wireless solutions.

There are several technologies that we work on and there are many options that are available right from Wi-Fi, which is one of the most widely prevalent techs to Wi-Fi Mesh and which is a new technology and Wi-Max, for which there is lot of involvement in the market in this.

What is your go to market strategy in India?

There are several areas that we are targeting in India. Predominantly wireless started off with enterprise connectivity. For the next at least two-three years, our focus would be on outdoor connectivity. From this standpoint, if we look at various business verticals where we can see application of wireless connectivity, we have several. The biggest is the government space, the second is service provider space for providing wireless solutions and the third is connectivity for managing disasters and providing connectivity in areas where wired connectivity cannot be provided.

The SP space is where we expect wide spread deployment to happen. The SPs are looking at unlicensed band and evolve business models around that. We are talking to Indian SPs and the experience that we have gained in working with SPs in more mature economies like US and Europe, we want to implement that over here.

Campus connectivity in universities is also one space that can be targeted, as it becomes a productivity tool. Then there is the server market, providing connectivity in residence, hospitality industry, hotspots, public transport system, etc. We have also started getting queries about how wireless can to be implemented in say metro rail.

What kind of wireless adoption do you see in India?

Wireless is a growing market in India. From a price-performance standpoint, Wi-Fi has got a lot of advantage. With the advent of new standards like 802.11g and the upcoming standard of 802.11n, we will be increasing the sort of reach and bandwidth available. In addition, the other thing happening is that it is getting integrated with IP-based systems, which basically allows you to handle more complex tasks like quality of service (QoS), security, etc. They start getting integrated in the wireless domain itself. This provides a lot of maturity to Wi-Fi than some of the emerging technologies that may be there.

We can look at the adoption in three parts Adoption in enterprise space, adoption in rural space – this is an area to watch out for in the next 18-24 months and adoption from a service provider (SP) standpoint – providing carpet coverage, hot spot coverage and SOHO connectivity.

In the consumer and enterprise space, Wi-Fi is very well adopted now. In the SP space, tier 1 players are still looking at the market and figuring out how business models work in unlicensed spectrum. Large tier 1 SPs are slowly looking at it, but there are tier 2 challengers who are quickly building up networks or hot spot businesses or point to multipoint businesses to start connecting out villages.

You are also targeting the defense sector in India. What are the opportunities in this space for Cisco?

Typically, defense applications are more point-to-point and point-to-multipoint links in licensed spectrum. They tend to avoid any use of the unlicensed spectrum. So most often the queries we get is more oriented around having an early set up because these networks are easy to build and easily deployable especially in areas where you have to set up a network on the fly. So it is in those areas where the wireless networks are being addressed.

We are also talking to them about several other networks, which basically combine the licensed and unlicensed bands. Licensed bands are being used for connectivity from say a battalion headquarter to a unit but the local area mobility for providing connectivity for network centric warfare is being provided over maybe Wi-Fi. But these are just trials that are going on as typically defense does not deploy unlicensed spectrum at all. And they would want to continue that way for the foreseeable future.

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