India Telecom

Hughes crosses 10,000 VSAT installations in India

NEW DELHI -- Hughes Network Systems (HNS) recently announced that it had crossed 10,000 VSAT installations in India.

Hughes expects to double its current installed base within the next year. It aims to achieve this by bagging some of the biggest customer orders in the Indian satellite communications market in FY 2002-03, with cumulative order booking expected to exceed 25,000 VSATs. Currently, it has installed about 4,450 shared hub VSAT terminals and over 2,500 dedicated VSAT terminals for the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the RBI's network for all nationalized banks in India being implemented by the Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) in Hyderabad. It has also deployed more than 3,000 VSATs for organizations such as NIC, HVNET, ERNET, etc, which are maintained by customers directly.

Hughes recently announced the launch of DirecWay, a comprehensive, end-to-end satellite broadband service, in March 2002. With an investment of over $15 million in introducing DirecWay, HECL became the first national satellite broadband service provider in the Indian market to offer services in over 800 cities and rural areas across the country.