Soma Networks’ Senior Vice-President (Operations), Mr Tom Flak, with a home wireless router.

Anand Parthasarathy

Advertisement

Singapore, June 20 The intense competition and wafer-thin margins in the mobile telecom business is pushing Indian service providers to seek compelling global solutions that promise to squeeze that extra paisa of revenue per user.

BPL, with one million-plus cellular subscribers in the Mumbai metropolitan area, has just tied up with Canada-based Redknee, for the latter’s real time rating and charging solution.

It will allow BPL to offer more flexible, competitive, pricing and solutions to its customers, exploiting Redknee’s suite of products that enable telecom providers to offer highly personalised plans.

In many cases customers can fine-tune for themselves the precise service plan that they want.

The announcement was made by Redknee , at the CommunicAsia show which ended here on Friday.

Meanwhile, BSNL is putting in place mobile WiMax offerings in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa and Andhra Pradesh, harnessing the FlexMAX infrastructure and solutions from San Francisco-based Soma Networks, the first company to offer converged broadband solutions based on Internet Protocol.

Mr Tom Flak, Soma’s Senior Vice-President for Company Operations, told Business Line on the sideline of the CommunicAsia show, that the slate of hardware offerings included modular base stations, indoor desktop subscriber gateways and non-line of sight mobile stations.

The company’s forte lay in the exceptional ease with which its indoor subscriber gateways or routers could be self-installed in home and small businesses.

This meshed well with BSNL’s plans to move beyond the enterprise WiMax market to harness the technology for Internet penetration in the rural hinterland, he added.

Soma was co-founded in 1999 by former Planning Commission Member and the founder of Engineers India, Mr M.S. Pathak and his son Mr Yatish, who is currently the Chief Executive Officer .

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu Business Line