Tellium eyes Indian market

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, DEC. 15. The globally established optical fibre switch maker Tellium of the U.S. has cast its eyes on the burgeoning Indian market where service providers of all sorts are vying for a piece of large cake available in the post-liberalisation phase.

A team from the New Jersey-based company is now in India, making business calls on service providers of assorted categories - the Government represented by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (VSNL), utilities such as the Railways and the newly sprung up private players such as Dishnet, Bharati Telecom and Reliance.

``The focus of our current visit is to try and assess the needs of the Indian market,'' said Mr. Stefan Levine, director, corporate development of the company. Describing the response `positive than expected,' Mr. Levine said Tellium could nicely cash in on the absence of advanced switches in the sub-continent. In his reckoning, the `technological lag' in India could itself prove `positive' for Tellium's entry into the country.

``A fibre is a dead hardware,'' said Mr. Debanjan Saha, principal architect at Tellium. It is in the selection of an appropriate switch lies the efficacy or otherwise of an optical fibre network which is now becoming the order of the day across the globe.

Tellium has on offer supposedly superior Aurora optical switches. These are based on simpler, flexible and yet superior mesh architecture which is modular as opposed to the conventional switches based on ring architecture. ``The usage of Aurora switches will enable India to leap-frog in technology,'' said Mr. J. B. Gupta, Vice-President, Arya Communications and Electronics Services Ltd., which will act as some sort of a bridge between Tellium and its prospective clients in India.

At present, Tellium has put on the marketplace couple of state-of-the-art switches - Aurora 512 and Aurora 128. Come 2001, it is expected to release 2K/2N switches. According to Mr. Saha, the multi-directional 512 port Aurora switch can transmit 2.5 gigabits of data per second. The conventional switch may need 16 bays. This meant a lot of space, power usage and what not with attendant cost added to them. The Aurora switch can bring down the bay need to just four, saving enormous cost.

The flexible Tellium switches, according to Mr. Levine, can help a service provider to hit upon innovative revenue streams by promising `just-in time provisioning of bandwith.'' Typically, live `phone-in' programmes - which need excess bandwidth for a while at a particular time - can be organised sans any hiccup without of course disturbing the network in any way.

Mr. Levine has reckoned that the deployment of latest generation switches such as the one from Tellium will go a long way in effecting considerable saving in capital expenditure over time.

Tellium's alliance with India comes close on the heels of it winning close to $650 million deals from Qwest Communications and Cable and Wireless. Tellium, it may be recalled, has been named among the top 50 private companies by Red Herring.

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