BHARTI IS NOW THE LARGEST VSAT OPERATOR

Joji Thomas Philip, New Delhi
The Economic Times

Telecom major Bharti Airtel is now turning its attention on other communication arms as well, as the company plans to reduce dependence on revenues from cellular services. The enterprises arm, which includes the undersea cable business, now accounts for over 20 percent of the company’s revenues and is growing. Apart from providing end-to-end solutions to large corporates, carrying national and international long-distance traffic, Bharti has been building up its presence in the VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) segment too, says its president for enterprise services, David Nishball.

VSAT is a medium to connect geographically dispersed locations and is often used when other connectivity options are economically unviable. The advantages of using this platform are faster deployment, high reliability, easy manageability and cost effectiveness over cable.

Nishball speaks on the company’s plans for VSAT and enterprise services. Excerpts:

Where does Bharti stand in terms of its VSAT operations?

We are now the largest VSAT operator as per the latest figures available with the regulator, Trai. We have gained market leadership in this space by bagging a series of huge contracts in the recent past—for instance, we have executed a contract to set up 13,716 VSAT stations in Gujarat.

Similarly, we have also provided another 8,000 VSAT centres across Tamil Nadu, Goa, MP, UP and Haryana. The government’s focus on rural connectivity centres, for which VSAT often offers the best option, has resulted in this segment picking up.

Your largest undertaking so far has been Gujarat’s eGram project where you have connected 13,716 villages. Can you give us more details?

We provided the telecom infrastructure to connect Village Panchayats Offices and Common Service Centres (CSCs).The connected eGRAMs and CSCs will help deliver high quality and cost-effective video, voice and data services in the areas of e-agriculture, e-governance, e-health and e-education in a phased manner. In select villages, business services such as banking and insurance will also be offered through the CSCs.

The connectivity will also facilitate point-to-point and point-to-multipoint video conferencing services, VoIP services and both intra & internet services at the CSCs in over 6,000 villages to begin with. This will later be extended to cover all villages. We completed this project is four months—we were rolling out 100 plus sites a day, and the peak rollout has been nearly 175 sites a day.

What is driving VSAT growth in India? What advantages does Bharti have over other players in this space? How will you leverage your mobile and fibre footprint in this space?

Three factors that are driving VSAT growth in India. First is the numerous rural connectivity projects being rolled out by the government. Second, is the banking sector—the more they go rural, branches and especially ATMs will need VSAT connectivity. In many instances, we have seen that VSAT is used a backup even at those centres that are connected by fibre.

The emergence of organised retail in India is another positive development. From point-of-sale devices to storage facilities, all such places need reliable connectivity. Unlike pure VSAT operators, at Bharti we have an unique advantage as we can offer fibre, VSAT connectivity and a combination of other solutions to medium and small enterprises. We can give our customers a choice and they decide based on what is best for their business.

We can also combine VSAT with wireless technologies like WiMAX and Internet based technologies like IPVPN and provide seamless migration from one technology platform to the other. A pure VSAT operator does not have this liberty of offering solutions over different technologies.

Coming to your enterprise services, Bharti planned to launch calling card business across several countries by March ‘08. This has not happened. So far, this service is available only in the US.

We are in the process of rolling out our services in these countries that have large NRI populations such as the UK, Canada, West Asian nations, Malaysia and Singapore. You will soon hear on this front. The infrastructure is being put in place for the rollouts.