Telecom Lead India: ASSIA builds management systems for
DSL service providers. ASSIA is in the process of strengthening its presence in
Asian telecom markets including India and China.
ASSIA has more than 50 million lines under contract
worldwide with top-tier service providers and is backed by strategic investors,
including AT&T, Mingly China Growth Fund, SFR Development, Sandalwood
Partners, Sofinnova Partners, Stanford University, Swisscom Ventures,
T-Ventures, and Telefonica.
John M Cioffi, CEO and chairman of the Board, ASSIA,
speaks on the role of DSL and Wi-Fi in carrier offload and data trafficking:
What are your future plans and expansion plans? Also,
share your plans for the Asia-Pacific and other emerging markets.
ASSIA is actively expanding its business along 3
axes: product, geography, and customer. ASSIA has a strong U.S. footprint
and a growing presence in Europe and South America. The company has
recently secured its first Asian customer, Thailand TRUE, and is make major
investments in growing its business in Asia. In addition to an office in
Beijing, ASSIA has worked closely with a partner in India to prepare the market
for its DSL network optimization solutions.
ASSIA has worked to penetrate all Tier 1 and 2 service
provider customers in the regions it serves. ASSIA has captured more than
90 percent of the U.S. market and is rapidly growing share worldwide.
What is your go-to market strategy?
ASSIA has served its primary service provider customers
via a direct sales force. Where local partners are required or preferred,
ASSIA has formed alliances with leading firms in country to deliver ASSIA’s
solutions. As ASSIA expands its product portfolio, the company is
increasingly seeking partners that can help deliver a broader set of solutions
to customers whose business relies heavily on the quality of the consumer’s
broadband connection.
What is the role of DSL and Wi-Fi in carrier offload? How
they help cellular networks in handling data traffic coming from smartphones
and tablets?
Cellular data traffic is almost doubling each year,
clearly outstripping the ability of the cellular network to accommodate.
Although smaller cell sites, spectrum re-use, and improvements in cellular
technology provide stopgap solutions, the only long-term solution is to offload
cellular traffic to wired networks. All new smartphones and tablets are
Wi-Fi enabled, so the offload from the cellular network to Wi-Fi is easy, since
Wi-Fi is free, pervasive, and supports high-speed broadband. The key
element, however, is the wired broadband access link to provide the data
backhaul to the core network. Since DSL provides 70 percent of consumer
broadband service worldwide, most of that backhaul role falls on DSL.
Making those DSL links stable, reliable, and high-speed is fundamental to
building a strong cellular network. ASSIA’s products make the cellular
offload solution practical and economic.
Data traffic is increasing over cellular networks.
Is this a crisis situation, or an opportunity to be tapped?
The chart below illustrates the challenge facing cellular
networks and is based on projections from Cisco. Cellular data is growing
at 92 percent CAGR – almost doubling each year. The only long-term
solution to support this growth is for Wi-Fi to offload an increasing portion
of that traffic. Wi-Fi offloaded 31 percent of this traffic in 2010 and
is expected to offload 39 percent by 2015.
This problem is particularly acute in India, given the
high ratio of mobile users to wired broadband connections. Those wired
broadband connections – primarily DSL – will have to be especially fast and
stable to support cellular offload. The technology to make this cellular
offload solution work is available now from ASSIA.
What are your offerings for handling data traffic?
ASSIA DSL Expresse is a DSL network management solution
that includes the first mobile application for field technicians, and new
software tools to evaluate ADSL lines for conversion to high-bandwidth VDSL.
Today, more than 50 million DSLs around the world are managed by major service
providers using DSL Expresse. This highly sophisticated software allows
broadband operators to maximize delivered speed and bandwidth, improve quality
of service, reduce operating costs, and improve customer service.
Please share stats on how broadband networks are being
rearchitected to meet the insatiable demands of consumers. How big the DSL
service market is?
DSL in all its combinations delivers about 70 percent of
all consumer broadband worldwide, as shown in the following chart, based on
Point Topic data. It is clear that DSL has maintained its dominance of
the consumer market throughout the last 8 years. The worldwide DSL
service market is about $150 billion per year.
Moreover, DSL technology has steadily evolved so that the
copper wires that already serve 1.2 billion homes around the world are capable
of achieving very-high broadband speeds, including over 100Mbps, as shown in
the chart below.
What are your new, innovative products?
ASSIA’s newest products fall into 4 categories:
1. Software that
improves the performance of DSL networks by individually tuning each line from
the equipment that delivers the service (the DSLAM, or DSL access
multiplexer). This software supports ADSL, VDSL, and vectored DSL lines.
2. A cloud-based
service, combined with a hardware element in the home that further improves DSL
service speed and reliability.
3. A cloud-based
service that enables the cellular offload solution described above.
4. A cloud-based
service that improves the stability and speed in wireless networks,
particularly Wi-Fi.
Danish Khan
editor@telecomlead.com
