The networking equipment market, last year, started with a bang and ended the
year with hands in prayers. It has been a dismal year in which router, the
fastest growing market segment, showed only a growth of 86 percent. Segments
like leased line modems and RAS which had fanciful flights in terms of growth
was brought back to Earth. RAS showed only a 21 percent growth, while leased
line modems did equally worse at 22 percent growth.
The trends clearly show a slackening carrier market while large enterprises
took to wide area networks. While ISPs faltered, banks rose to the ocassion
executing LANs and WANs to connect their branches and be more efficient.
If one keeps a track on the growth of LAN equipments down the years, it
clearly emerges that LANs are fast moving to a switched architecture rather than
a shared one. Prices of basic products have also severely dropped, hence
affecting the toplines and bottomlines of the NIC and hub segments.
NIC
The
total market for NICs is estimated to be Rs 82.94 crore in 2000-01. The market
declined by about 11 percent from the previous years’ sales. This was on
account of slackening sales of NICs in the last two quarters of the fiscal. The
year 2000-01 ended with sales of an estimated 1,048,000 NIC units, compared to
last year’s 1,098,000. The average price of an Ethernet NIC, which forms the
bulk of NICs sales, remained for Rs 500.
The clear leader was D-Link who sold 380,000 units with total
revenue of Rs 39 crore and an overall market share of 47 percent. But, the
players that made a mark during last year were Intel and Dax. Intel cut into the
other’s market share gaining more than 4 percent to end the year with 15
percent of the market. And, Dax came out of the blue to capture 9 percent of the
market. While all this was happening, 3Com decided to move away from the
mass-market range of products to focus on manageability and feature-rich range.
A battle between Intel and 3Com raged in this high range Fast Ethernet/Gigabit
Ethernet NIC market, where the average price of a card was over Rs 2,500.
The other visible players in this market were Allied Telesyn,
Accton and Linksys.
Hubs
The
total market for hubs, today, stands just above Rs 49 crore in 2000-01. The
overall sales revenue dropped as against that in the previous year by about 35
percent. This is primarily because the segment has witnessed two distinct
trends. First, switches penetrating into the hubs market. Second, it has become
an off-the-shelf product line. This market typically saw growth in mostly
unmanaged hubs, as the managed hub users have moved on to use switches. The
market, also clearly, saw a shift towards the 10/100 Mbps. In fact, Intel,
Allied and Accton have been very active in this space. The average sales value
per unit was around at Rs 5,000 for the unmanaged segment. And a total of over
14.5 lakh ports of hubs were sold during the last fiscal.
The
top five players in this category are D-Link, Allied Telesyn, Dax, 3Com and
Intel. D-Link, clearly is the brand that is selling the most. It has almost
65.31 percent market share in the category and is the king of the market. And,
its competition would come from the likes of Dax and Linksys in this space, as
3Com and Intel have moved to the higher end of the market.
Router
The
windfall of 1999-00 that router sales saw, promised to continue with good sales
all the way through the first half of the year, but this growth rate suddenly
started falling in the second half, and came down to a low-rate in the final
quarter. This dramatic slowdown was due to the trickledown effect that the US
economy slowdown had on IT services in India. Both ISPs and IDCs promised to
falter at the end. Many big ISPs and IDCs failed to rise above the boardrooms
and business plans on paper. Funding was the biggest issue why these companies
could not take off.
Though spending continued among the established ones like BSNL, VSNL, Satyam,
etc., but it was not to the tune of the previous fiscal. And though new ISPs
like Tata ISP, HCL Infinet, Hughes Tele and ERNET, laid out their networks for
Internet services, the sum total number of rollout did not match the previous
fiscal, both in numbers and magnitude. An uncertain market kept them away from
lavish expenditure.
The
other sectors actually came to the rescue of the router segment. Banking and
finance sector played the role of the knight in shining armor. Banks like Dena,
Vyasa, RBI, Karnataka Bank, American Express and Global Trust executed huge
projects worth crores of rupees–all of them had to link their LANs across
localities and cities in the country due to competition as well as RBI
directives. The financial institutions themselves connected heavily. BSE, LIC,
UTI, IDRBT, Tata AIG, etc., all spent multiple of crores on wide area
networking. Other sectors like manufacturing, transport/utility and government,
pitched in with their own share of wide area networking projects.
So, the year 2000-01 ended with router companies clocking in Rs 408 crores
through their routers. The annual growth recorded last year was 86.3 percent.
The number of routers sold during the fiscal were 24,337, as compared to
17,000 in the previous fiscal. That shows a growth by only 29 percent. But
value-wise, the growth has been much better due to the better deployment of
high-end routers of which some were capable of Gigabit routing. Though average
price of a router further dropped to about 65,000 at the low-end of the market,
prices at the mid-end were still at an average 2.3 lakh. And as you went up the
value chain, Gigabit routers came at prices of Rs 60 lakh and more.
Cisco retained its grasp over this segment last year as well, despite the
somewhat hyped entry of Juniper and Unisphere — two young next-generation
technology startups. During last fiscal, Cisco managed to hold on to consolidate
and increase its market share to 84.8 percent as compared to 72 percent of the
previous fiscal. And the nearest competitor, Nortel, was way behind at just 6
percent.
The market for Gigabit router did not live up to the expectations as
telecommunications build-outs got delayed due to policy delays, market
uncertainty and lack of finance. The setting up of offices by Juniper and
Unisphere was more of an initial market contacting/discussion process and both
did negligible business in reality. Still, Unisphere were able to accomplish
sales of Rs 4 crore during the last fiscal, which is approximately 1 percent of
the market. This year, however, many more telecommunications backbones are
expected to be rolled out, with hundreds of miles of the country already been
wired up with dark fiber. And, these players are likely to play hard to not
allow Cisco to monopolize this space, as it has done in the low and mid-end of
the market. The market for routers looks quite promising and should again be
touching its previous growth rates of hundred percent and above. That is, if the
current economic slowdown does not continue beyond six months. Which could in
turn, further delay long due projects in the telecommunications sector.
RAS
It
has been a dramatically disappointing year for the Remote Access Server (RAS)
market. After registering a 385 percent growth in 1999-00, it only managed 21
percent growth, posting an annual sales of Rs 198 crore during 2000-01. The
growth could have been much better if not for a better first half, during which
many of the incumbent ISPs expanded their capacities.
The one big reason for the absence of expenditure on RAS was the investment
crunch faced by many of the ISPs, which had taken licenses and were ready to
rollout, but did not have the money to go forward. There was lack of confidence
in the Internet access market among Venture Capitalists (VCs) and other
investors. One, the market for dial-up access had intensely shrinked with the
entry of free ISPs, aggressiveness of VSNL/MTNL which reduced access charges to
a low record, and incumbent private ISPs like Satyam, Mantra and Dishnet who had
captured the potential audience to a large exent. The reported subscription
growth to 3 million by the end of last fiscal did not really translate into real
subscriber base, as many users used more than one ISP and their practice of
delayed listing of subscribers who had shifted or finished an account. Two,
there was an air of uncertainty over the telecommunications scenario in the
country, which also affected the investor’s mood.
However,
last year, spending did not come anywhere near to a halt. Especially, during the
first half of the fiscal, many of the ISPs re-ordered RAS systems from the
vendors. BSNL went all out to expand its network to almost every state capital
and major district capitals of India. VSNL, Satyam Infoway, Mantra Online and
Caltiger, all made large purchases during the year. In fact Mantra Online is
supposed to have ordered more than 10,000 ports. Then there was also the entry
of new major players like Tata ISP, HCL Infinet and Data Access. The total
number of RAS ports sold during the FY 2000-01 was approximately 240,000.
Also, there was a new avenue in the wireless space, where CDMA, Wireless in
Local Loop and service providers like MTNL, Tata Teleservices, Bharti Telenet,
Shyam Telecom, etc., went in for data enabling a portion of their lines. In
fact.
A very significant and positive trend, seen during the last fiscal, was the
start of a real big RAS implementation for internal use by large organizations
like L&T Netcom, ERNET and IRCOT. And, this trend is expected to pick up in
the current year.
The average price per port of RAS during 2000-01 was Rs 8,000 and depended on
how many ports were purchased. A bulk of last year’s purchase was also digital
ports to take an E1/R2 input line instead of thirty-two separate telephone
lines. On the CMTS side, one saw expansion of capacity and Point of Presence in
multiple cities by cable ISPs like in2Cable, Hathway and SitiCable. New
implementations in this space came from Mantra Online, Asianet, Amtek and
Reliance Telecom. On the DSL front though, things were moving at a slow pace as
BSNL and MTNL were not allowing unbundling of their exchange to put DSLAM for
DSL access provision. However, Dishnet did go forward with its DSL services by
expanding it across Chennai.
In the market place, 3Com was the leader gaining a stronghold over the top
tier ISPs, and in the process dethroned Cisco from the throne of the top RAS
vendors in India. It was commanding a market share of 53 percent by the end of
the fiscal, in comparison to Cisco’s 25 percent market share. The nearest
competitor to these two companies was Nortel having only 8 percent of the
market. However, with more action likely in the broadband space, the Remote
Access Concentrator market is likely to be much bigger this year, with Unisphere
already signaling its presence with the deal that it picked up by HCL Infinet.
Modem
It has been the year of the two ‘Teks’ in the industry–MRO-Tek
and Microtek. While the first one continued to hold its sway in the leased line
category, Microtek came from nowhere to reach the No. 2 position in the dial-up
category. The dial-up modems market was Rs 198.16 crore and the digital modems
market was Rs 128.20 crore. The broadband market, too, took off on both the
cable and ADSL front. 3Com has done very well in this space in which the other
vendors include GI, Com21, Terayon, Katherein and Scientific Atlanta. And, new
distributors like Capital Technologies, etc. started to enter the market.
However, for our analysis, this year, we are considering only the top two
product categories for want of adequate data on the broadband modem space.
The
FY 2000-01 has been the year of consolidation in the modems market in the
dial-up segment. The squeezing margins in this volume segment and easy
availability across the counter positioning led to a few of them moving away
from that business. For example, PowerTel Bocca, which used to carry the Bocca
range of products got out of the business to become Citrix. This range, today,
is being carried by Convergent Communications. Similarly, Priya International,
which carried GVC, also distanced away. In the process, D-Link consolidated its
market share, and Dax and Microtek emerged as strong brands in the South and
North respectively. Bangalore-based Select Technologies entered the market with
ACE brand of products. The trend clearly was that of the volumes’ king,
D-Link, by its pure reach and collective portfolio of networking products, held
its ground strongly, and new and young distributors through their sheer energy
carved out a space for themselves.
The exploding Internet growth, which has a direct influence
on the modem sales, fuelled a very strong growth in volume, but saw stiff
reduction on the per unit price. As a result, the total dial-up modems sold in
the country were over 9.7 lakh and with sales revenue touching Rs 198.16 crore.
The external modems (56 Kbps) were available at a low rate of Rs 2,700 and 33.6
Kbps ones at a price of Rs 2,000. The internal modems were about Rs 700. And the
prime reason for the fall in the prices has not just been because of
competition. But almost all the players who distributed the modems had
manufacturing units in the country and have looked at value-additions to make it
suit to the Indian environment. There are also a few original product
manufacturers like Hyderabad-based Team Engineers, which does its own branded
products.
The
real star performer this year has been Microtek. It not only filled the gap that
was left over last year by the departure of Powertel Bocca and Priya, but also
captured a significant market share of over 24 percent with total revenue of Rs
46.05 crore. This has been possible due to two reasons, first, its strong
distribution network and second, the customer has found it easier to relate to
its monitor brand image and extend it to the Internet connectivity. This year
could be a real battlefield for each of these players, as each one of the top
five has carved out a niche for itself, and entering into anothers’ territory
could be a tough call.
From a total sales of Rs 22 crore in 1998-99 to Rs 136.6
crore in 2000-01, the digital modems market has really grown exponentially. In
1999-00, the sales soared dizzily due to the steep cut in cost of leased lines,
and it was estimated that sales in the period under review would race ahead. But
unfortunately, due to delay in the ISP sector and telcos to go ahead with their
projects, this segment had its tale of woes. Further, delay in the availability
of Cisco routers, too, choked the situation. Because of these two factors the
digital modems sales grew by 22 percent only with estimated revenue of Rs 136.6
crore. The total number of units sold during the last fiscal was 34,188. Like
the previous year, FY 2000-01 too, belonged to MRO-Tek. It did a total sale of
25,000 units and a business of Rs 81 crore.
The bulk of the sales has primarily come on account of the 64
Kbps products. However, this year, the DSL modem sales too grew sharply. Tellabs
and Ericsson, were the real major players. While Tellabs continued with its
consistent performance and perseverance, Alcatel, Ascom and Ericsson gained on
account of a few key wins from service providers and ISPs. Among the
distributors, MRO-Tek and Convergent were the well-known names.
VSAT
It
was an unfavorable year for the VSAT industry, as the growth in revenue terms
was not even one percent. The total market size was estimated at Rs 214.74 crore.
On the number front, i.e., the number of VSATs installed, the industry
registered an average growth of around 39 percent. This was far below the 49
percent registered in 1999-00.
The decline in revenue was due to an inapt growth in the DAMA
terminals, as it registered a negative growth of around 17 percent. This slow
growth can be attributed to lack of transponder capacity in the first half,
large government tenders put on hold and e-commerce business like Skumars.com
and many others could not takeoff. Other reasons were VSAT for village telephony
was not allowed due to policy, corporates adopted a wait-and-watch policy and
Internet via VSAT was very slow because of unclear regulatory policies.
 | NA stands for Not Applicable |
 | (20.0) stands for sales from VSAT hub |
It seems that the much-awaited VSAT policy based on revenue
sharing is still awaiting government clearance and is expected soon. The policy
will help in reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of VSAT and make it more
affordable. Along with the lifting up of the 64 Kbps ban for 512 Kbps, this will
help the industry to grow at a faster rate in this fiscal. And it is expected
that the industry will grow at around 50 percent if the policy gets a go ahead
within the first quarter of 2001. Allowing Ku-band along with extended C-band
will provide more opportunities for the industry. HECL has already set Ku-band
hub and is testing it. HCL Comnet has also gone for Ku-band hub to be
operational in June.
The
total tally of VSAT installation in the country moved to 17,545 of which 4,928
were contributed in 2000-01. The country added 4,238 TDMA terminals and 686 DAMA
terminals during the same period. DAMA accounted for 14 percent of the total
VSAT sales in the country.
In terms of revenue, Hughes Network System was the No. 1
player leading the race with Rs 82.54 crore. Viasat, which also had Scientific
Atlanta under its fold, for the first time, was unable to make a breakthrough
and paved way to Gilat which stood at No. 2 with revenue of Rs 65 crore. Viasat’s
performance was not up to the mark and the company made a revenue of Rs 40.07
crore. The company had a face saving grace through the sale of VSAT hub in the
country. Nortel DASA and India Satcom had a bad year. Radyne was a new entrant
in the Indian market through Comsat Max.
Banking and finance still dominated the scene followed by
manufacturing, stocks and security, and distance education. Media was also a
bulk buyer, as it helped them in providing faster information to their viewers.
This year the retail segment will dominate the scene. The
foundation of distance education will be strengthened in this fiscal, as one
will see many institutes opting for it. Even hospitals and medical institutes
will go for tele-medicine applications, once the new policy is operational. VSAT
service providers like HECL, HCL Comnet and Comsat Max have started providing
value-added services, and would be more aggressive this year with their VPN and
IDC products.
They will also provide Internet access via VSATs. Moreover,
e-governance will also drive VSAT demand in the country.
Structured Cabling
The
premises cabling market grew over 30 percent, on account of hectic buying in the
IT, banking and finance, and government sectors. We estimate the total size of
the structured cabling market at manufacturers sales to be Rs 225 crore for the
passing fiscal. Further, like in the previous fiscal, there was an increased
activity in the reseller market.
In fact, all the players, who have been in the market, have
consolidated their base and increased their presence. While there were no new
entrants in the scene, we saw Finolex entering the market aggressively through a
MoU with Leviton. The two most dominant players in the industry still remain
Avaya (the spin-off of Lucent, which today has the structured cabling business);
and Tyco (formerly AMP) with total sales revenue of Rs 95 crore and Rs 48 crore
respectively. The two jointly accounted for over 60 percent of the total market.
Though Avaya continues to have the largest market share and revenue, integrators
and distributors all feel that Tyco enjoyed the topnotch mindshare. The others
who enjoyed the top-of-the-mind recall in projects include Panduit, Krone and
Molex. While for Lucent and Tyco, the visibility was very high on account of
their total solutions product portfolio, Panduit found its place because of its
cable manager solutions.
The
real winner of FY 1999-2000, D-Link continued to harness its stranglehold of the
last fiscal too. D-Link, through its aggressive pricing strategy and strong
retailer network, did Rs 30 crore of sales. Krone, Molex, and TVS Net too
consolidated their hold on the market after the global restructuring. In a
market dominated by Avaya and Lucent, the above mentioned players discovered new
avenues in the sub-250 node networks and the upcountry markets.
Interestingly, all players have looked at adding more
distributors and tying up with more integrators on one hand, while on the other,
they looked at training and certification. Molex for example, has added two
national distributors, Krone entered into partnership with ITI and Nebula,
Deltafull and Duratube added more distributors, etc. In other words, the
principals clearly found out that the integrators are no more aligned with a
single vendor. The SIs provide anything that the customer demands.
Among the solutions, Enhanced Cat5 solutions have been the
choice for the middle and upper segments of the market. In fact, the market has
settled down on this. Proposed Cat6 solutions, however, are popular in software
segments. As far as fiber is concerned, 50/125-multimode fiber and composite
fiber cables found acceptance in the market. Like the previous year, the biggest
buyers have been software development centers, government, manufacturing, and
banking and financing sectors. Tyco, for example, grew by 180 percent in the IT
sector. Similarly, all the others have also seen this as a key sector. This
year, however, we could see the IT sector spending coming down to about 40
percent, due to the US economy sneeze effect. However, the government sector
spending is likely to race ahead.
LAN Switches
In
the previous fiscal, LAN switches posted a healthy 57 percent growth over
1999-00, to register a total sales revenue of Rs 612 crore. The total number of
switches sold during the year was 55,204 units. Growth came from almost all the
industrial sectors, however there were two new exciting areas of action last
year–call center segment and the Internet Data Center (IDC) segment. The call
center segment was where large switch sales of Rs 1 crore happened, the major
buyers being Flex, Ansals, Sitel, Spectramind, Air Infotech and Himalaya T
Commerce, among others. The IDC segment also came up with orders worth Rs 50
lakh to Rs 1.5 crore. Layer 3 switches comprised the major chunk of what was
bought, but Layer 4-7 switches also made their mark in this segment. The active
IDCs, last year, were VSNL, Satyam, Cyquator, Netmagic, Enron, Max India, Global
Telesystems and Innodata.
The
traditional switch buyers from banking & finance, manufacturing,
transport/utility, and educational institutions continued to contribute in a
quiet but significant manner. Banking and financial institutions executed the
largest LANs in India, last year. To name a few, the big ones were BSE, EDRBT,
RBI, Andhra Bank and NSE. Banks like ICICI, UTI, IDBI and Central Bank of India
established their own data centers. The manufacturing sector saw large LANs
being deployed by ACC, IOCL, BPCL, Carrier Aircon, Nestle, Cochin Refineries,
Goodlass Nerolac, EIL and Kerala Rubber Board, among others. The IT sector, also
lived up to expectations from the switch sector in spite of the global tech
climb down. And, the educational institutions and transport/utility companies
also contributed their share.
Last year, the switch market developed into multiple distinct
categories. On one end, there were stackable and standalone 10/100 Mbps switches
with different configurations of 8 ports, 12 ports, 16 ports and 24 ports. It
was in this category that 3Com, the third largest switch market shareholder, in
this year’s analysis, dominated the market. Its competitors were Intel, Cisco
and D-Link. An average 16-port non-stackable model in this segment was at about
Rs 15,000 per unit, with per port price of about Rs 900. The stackable switches
were much more costly at about Rs 50,000 a unit on per port price of Rs 4,000.
Then there was the high-end chassis-based Layer 3 switch
category where the royal battle raged between the biggies of this year’s
Networking Masters, Cisco and Enterasys. The battle was tough, but Cisco emerged
as the winner this time, thus enabling it to lead in the overall LAN switch
analysis as well–Cisco ending the year with 41 percent market share and
Enterasys with 32 percent. Cisco’s product range clinched the overall
leadership for it, though Enterasys performed better in the high-end layer 3
switch category. The average price of a chassis-based Gigabit model stood at
about Rs 30 lakh. The entry of Extreme and Foundry did not make much difference,
as these brands, clearly, lacked NI representatives.
An interesting part of the switch drama during the last
fiscal, however, was the entry of Layer 4-7 switch players in the market. Here,
Nortel Networks with its acquired Alteon products dominated the market, though
f5 also managed to create a flutter or two.
This year, the switch segment could be in for better times,
as banks are expected to scramble up data centers as part of an RBI directive to
the banks to consolidate their IT resources. Also, despite the global tech
slowdown, the beginning of this year has already seen announcements by global
technology giants like Lucent, HP and Intel to recruit local developers. These
and other good signs like the encouraging general budget could place the
switching segment to overdrive, in the current fiscal.
Optical Transmission Equipment
India
has been primarily a switching country as far as the telecommunications
infrastructure is concerned. However, with the fast spread of the telephone
network and the introduction of data communications in the country, telcos like
BSNL, VSNL and MTNL, slowly started paying more attention to the core
transmission layer of the network. The optical transmission equipment market
took off with that and now, with the advent of multiple private operators, is at
a stage where it is likely to multiply in terms of both units’ shipment volume
and value.
The
market was still dominated by the big buyer BSNL, with purchases of over 4000
STM1, STM4 and STM16 SDH terminals, during 2000-01. The other significant buyers
were MTNL, VSNL, Indian Railways, etc. The private operators, both cellular
service providers and basic service licensees, contributed a negligible percent
to the entire market.
While ITI dominated the SDH industry with a market share of
60 percent, it was its JV offspring Fibcom, which garnered the largest customer
base in the country. Fibcom, sold more than 1,800 terminals and hence commanded
the second largest market share at 33 percent Fibcom impressively gained an
authoritative grip over the private telecom sector space with over 25 customers.
The challenge came from the companies like HFCL, Siemens, Lucent, Alcatel, etc.
However, the customer bases that these players addressed were only about half a
dozen.
Significantly, the first DWDM order announcement came from
Tata Powers, which was bagged by Sycamore and is likely to be implemented this
year. This year is likely to be much more active, as companies like Reliance,
VSNL, Bharti Telesonic, MTNL and BSNL are likely to taste their first DWDM
network transmission. The Indian optical transmission market is finally, ready
to transcend beyond light to various colors of light.
WAN Switches & Multiplexers
Service providers, during the last fiscal, deployed
multi-service switches and access multiplexers to provide managed data network
services and broadband DSL services.
The industry leader in providing multi-service switches was
Tellabs, which grabbed 33 percent of the WAN switches market. Its large
customers included VSNL, MTNL and BSNL. The competition in this space came from
Alcatel, whose switches got deployed in large projects like ASCON III and the
Indian Army ATM backbone, and Nortel . The partnership with ITI helped Alcatel.
Unisphere, however, made its presence felt with the HCL Infinet implementation.
The Digital Local Carrier (DLC) multiplexer market saw Alcatel emerging as the
strongest player with 36 percent market share, RAD following with 32 percent and
i2i Media with 13 percent.
The encouraging fact was the emergence of large WAN deployer’s
on the users’ side. To name a few — Western Railways, ONGC, Transworks,
Intelenet Global Services Ltd, Amex, idlx/efunds, GE Capital Int Services,
exl.service.com — all deployed switches that enabled ATM connectivity globally
or across the country. Some of these bought multiplexers as well for multiple
streams of data coming in and going out.
Wireless LAN
Wireless
LAN has posted sales of Rs 73.7 cores in 2000-01. This segment has received an
excellent growth, as almost all the ISPs are either deploying or testing it for
future deployment. The growth of wireless LAN is around 117 percent. Wireless
LAN products are mostly deployed by telecom and ISP users.
Wireless LAN deployments in the country are being done by
large integrators like IBM Global, CMC, HCL Comnet, Supreme and HCL Infosys. In
terms of installations (that is, revenue), IBM Global is far ahead of others.
Some of the smaller integrators which are very active in this segment are Gemini
Communications, Spanco Telesytems, MRO Tek and i2i Media.
Within a year of its launch in India, Western Multiplex, has
achieved a market leadership position with a market share of 54 percent. The
result — P-Com, which had a dominating market share of 63.4 percent in
1999-2000, has a market share of 34 percent. BreezeNET an ideal wireless
solution by Breezecom is ideal for both outdoor and indoor applications from
small to large corporate enterprises, remote offices, Internet Service Providers
and more.
Wireless LAN products are of two types — point-to-point and
point-to-multipoint for building-to-building connectivity and Internet access.
Companies are planning to launch point-to-multipoint products targeted at ISP
segments for a cost-effective last mile solution for corporate customers. Most
of the ISPs are using it for last mile wireless solution like STPI, Primus
India, VSNL, Estel and Spectranet.