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Wipro aims at low cost broadband service
By siliconindia
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Saturday, 02 August 2008, 01:17 IST
Bangalore: Aiming at making high speed broad band internet service cheaper, software major Wipro is now planning to develop new technology. According to the planned system, pizza boxes will be located on customer premises and it will allow broad band speed of between 100 megabits per second (Mbps) and one gigabit per second (Gbps).
The pizza boxes are under development and it will work on Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology and can support an average of 24 customers with a speed of 100 Mbps to allow features such as digital television services using internet technology.
Manoj Dighe, General Manager, telecom said that the products will be manufactured by Wipro's partners mainly in Europe and Taiwan at an investment of $70-$80 million. "We will be providing the software that will be the brain of the boxes. The products will help our tier-I and tier-II customers complement their portfolio. The production is not taking place in India because the margins here are low and manufacturing technology is lacking," he said.
"Wipro aims to sales of 2, 00,000-3, 00,000 'pizza boxes' - to be distributed by tier-I equipment vendors in five years and up a million ONT boxes in 3-5 years that will be cheaper, have right configuration for telecom service providers and help to bring down broadband rates," Dighe said.
The research team is also looking to develop products in wireless space, including Femto cells, or smaller cellular base stations, and unified communications. Dighe said that the infrastructure is already there due to presence of major unified communication companies, but what is required is development of applications on these platforms.
Wipro is also targeting to increase the share of revenues contributed by innovation projects to 10 percent this fiscal from seven percent in the previous one. The commercial launch of the new technology is expected to be next year.
