Expert View

March 31, 2005
Canova Wireless focusing on Wi-Fi

Geetanjali Wadhwa & Pradeep Chakraborty

BANGALORE -- Canova Wireless is a leading provider of high-speed, wireless and wired Internet services for hotels and their guests. The Canova solution allows hotel guests to connect to the Web, e-mail and corporate networks at speeds upto 50 times faster than traditional modem connections. Canova provides high-speed Internet access to over 400 hotels globally, totaling over 10,000 hotel rooms, and a number of major airports in the US. Convergence*Plus recently met up with Pala Annamalai, managing director, Canova Wireless, to learn more about the company and its plans. Excerpts from the interview:

Convergence*Plus: How did Canova Wireless perform last year?

Pala Annamalai: Canova had a very successful FY/CY2004. We nearly had a growth of 350 percent in turnover. Canova continues to be privately held and has been expanding to meet the growing demand for its products across various geographies. The company recently closed its funding with capital investments exceeding US $7 million, in which, the company had invested more that US $4 million in R&D for the Track OS with NNU (US).

Canova Wireless has been increasing its sales, marketing and business development presence in India by expanding the Bangalore office. Canova India will initially focus on the company's expansion to India and other Asian countries, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Mauritius, and Malaysia. We already have a partnership with Ceylinco Internet Services, one of the leading ISPs in Sri Lanka, with over 22,000 employers across Sri Lanka. We ourselves foresee a growth of 300 percent or more in the Asian market than the European market by the next financial year.

CP: What are your strategies for the Indian wireless space this year?

PA: Be creative, imaginative, think outside the box, offering value-added services, and an extremely competitive pricing strategy for our customers. Our TRACK OS enables us to provide global roaming for our customers and our existing customer will have no hassles in getting connected to Canova's site.

We see this segment has a bright opening over the next two years. We have already opened up our links as a leading provider in these segments across India -- corporate campuses of SMBs; SOHOs; residential broadband users; and service apartments and condominiums.

CP: How do you estimate Wi-Fi to take off in India? What role do you envisage playing?

PA: The Wi-Fi segment is likely to see sharp growth in India as well as the rest of Asia. Canova expects that several thousands of hotspots will emerge over the coming year in India. All of these operators will require delivering public Wi-Fi services successfully, while increasing revenues and profitability, and will require operational and billing support systems that are purpose-built in addition to a robust network architecture.

Canova is one of the leading next-generation companies offering carrier-class OSS that enable network operators to provision, manage and deploy small-/large-scale private and public WLAN networks. A Canova-enabled network allows mobile users to gain wireless, high-speed Internet access in private/public locations. The company's software handles provisioning, configuration, authentication, access control, security, pre-paid and post-paid billing, and roaming settlement for large public WLAN networks, in addition to remotely managing and updating multi-vendor hardware and Wi-Fi switches.

Canova's OSS and Hotspot Controller, a highly integrated, small footprint access device is being used in the provisioning, management and deployment of thousands of Wi-Fi hotspot nodes worldwide. Our OSS supports a variety of locations, including hotels, airports, restaurants, marinas/malls, college campuses, multi-dwelling units (MDUs), truck stops, etc.

With these and other solutions that will be announced shortly, Canova will be playing a leading role as a solutions provider in this expansion in the Wi-Fi market in India. We provide an online directory on the Canova Web site listing all hotspots where your customers can roam. Canova has relationships with all leading Wi-Fi subscriber aggregators, as well as over 400 additional roaming partners whose users will be drawn to your network.

CP: Wi-Fi security is said to have shown little improvement over time. Do you agree?

PA: Wi-Fi security has been a major concern for WLANs, especially for the corporate IT staff. It is important for enterprise users to have secure access to their corporate networks from remote locations, while blocking unwanted access through MAC filtering. The latest secure authentication methods, such as 802.1x, and encryption protocols, such as WPA/WEP having a flexible, extensible platform that accommodates these emerging security standards in a basic requirement.

CP: Do you see a space for Wi-Fi phones and Wi-Fi/GSM phones? In the same context, do you see a role for wide area W-Fi?

PA: Yes. Wi-Fi phones have a bright future, where people are able to forget their portable notebook case and carry their Wi-Fi enabled phones to use the Internet in the hotspots. Wide area Wi-Fi is being already implemented in several spots across the globe. Canova even plans for a wide area Wi-Fi to setup for our customers at an affordable cost for them to use. These phones will come into picture when wide area Wi-Fi becomes popular.

CP: How can operators in India make money from hotspots given that the laptop penetration is still quite low?

PA: The new sales picture from Intel says that a higher number of laptops have been sold, where it has become a record this year. It foresees selling more laptops than PCs during the current financial year.

CP: How do you see UWB as a technology

PA: UWB is considered as food for thought!

CP: Do you perceive WiMAX as a threat to Wi-Fi?

PA: No, WIMAX will be a support for Wi-Fi to get developed rapidly. India has one of the fastest-growing IT industries in the world, and this growth is likely to continue. Broadband Internet connectivity is critical for many businesses, so IT-dependent industry concentrates in areas where broadband service is available. Wireless last-mile broadband could accelerate deployment of meshed office WLANs (like Wi-Fi), and businesses could then backhaul the LAN traffic to a WiMAX network. Service providers will be able to quickly provide on-demand, high-speed connectivity to businesses anywhere within their base station range. This will encourage distributed urban and suburban business developments, as fixed connectivity resources no longer limit broadband services.

CP: What role does new Wi-Fi specific OSSs have to play with regard to integrating into legacy systems to enable offering bundled service offerings?

PA: We have been offering this connectivity to customers from 2003-04. Our goal is to offer clients a new technology whenever it lands/is born.

Contact:
Canova Wireless
Tel: +91-80-5766-7944
annamalai@canovawireless.com
www.canovawireless.com