Prakash Bajpai, Tikona CEO: Until now wifi has not been
used to deliver wireline quality broadband. Necessity is the
mother of invention 
                   
                   
A young company in India is using wifi technology to deliver fixed broadband services to 220,000 homes and 10,000 businesses — and it is aiming for 350,000 residential customers. But the company will also explore using LTE for further expansion.
Tikona Digital Networks is a private equity-backed company founded in 2008 by a team of telecoms industry veterans who took a radical view of India’s lack of broadband wireless spectrum.
“We decided to see how wifi could deliver a quality that is equivalent to wireline,” says Prakash Bajpai, a former president and CEO of Reliance Communications who is now CEO of Tikona.
The company uses a microcell architecture for its wifi base stations: “We were the first people to see wifi as an outdoor device,” he adds. “We decided to create a wifi cloud.”
India is one of the most competitive markets for mobile voice in the world, but the country has a desperate lack of broadband, he notes. “There has been fantastic growth in the past decade in mobile, but we have one of the lowest penetrations of broadband in the world. It’s only 1% penetration.”
Fixed broadband is no alternative. There has been little investment in wireline equipment “and the old copper is decaying every year”, he adds. “India doesn’t have the basic wireline connectivity. We are stuck with the basic mobile experience. I can’t see any wireline plant being built. It is just too expensive.” Nobody has invested in wireline plant “and nobody is planning to do that”.
This threatens India’s economy, he says. “The power of the internet is huge, but this puts India in a precarious state as a growing nation. We just don’t have broadband at all. It is needed by any growing nation. How are we going to solve this problem?”
So Bajpai and his colleagues decided to look at wireless equivalents of fixed broadband. But the problem — of course — was lack of spectrum. “It is a scarce and expensive resource.” Mobile operators are already complaining about the lack of spectrum for voice “and voice is a much lighter application: with video downloads you need a thousand times the bandwidth you need for mobile voice”, he says.
It’s a complaint that echoes a comment made by Vsevolod Rozanov, CEO of Russian-backed operator MTS India, in an interview in November 2011 with Global Telecoms Business (see links at the end of this article). His company has only 2.5 megahertz of mobile spectrum, he told GTB. “The government’s target is 160 million on broadband, but we have to get the spectrum, otherwise it’s impossible to realise the target.”
Bajpai decided to look elsewhere. Any licensed system “was not going to be available in large quantities, so we thought about unlicensed spectrum — the wifi band. This has not been used to deliver wireline quality broadband. That was the challenge we had: necessity is the mother of invention.” 
                   
                   
Unlicensed spectrum 
                   
The company raised $110 million from financial backers “with a game plan to exploit the unlicensed bands”, he explains. “We wanted to create a product and a service that is acceptable to the core market.” The company particularly looked at recent developments in radio technology, including beam forming — systems designed to focus transmissions from wifi base stations in the direction of users. “We wanted to find a way that the interference-prone wifi band was able to deliver a quality that is steady and reliable.”
A key supplier to Tikona is Ruckus Wireless, a Californian company which has designed what it calls intelligent antennas as well as beam-forming software to reduce interference problems.
Tikona started in the top 10 cities in India, though it has since expanded to a total of 40 communities. There are 150-200 million people within the coverage area, a demographic Bajpai describes as “the top end of the Indian market”.
Tikona never intended to compete with mobile: it does not aim to serve moving customers, so it does not have the challenges of varying signal strengths or handing off coverage from cell to cell. Its users are in their homes or offices with fixed antennas directed at the nearest base station. “Users are in buildings and our aim is deliver a steady and highly reliable service.”
Wifi has been an indoor technology, intended to distribute internet signals inside homes and offices. “We were the first people to look at wifi as an outdoor technology, with a microcell architecture so that you can create a wifi cloud and beam signals to homes and offices.”
The company does not promise that the Tikona signal can be received directly by a laptop or a tablet such as an iPad. “That would give a very limited range. We have customer premises equipment, a wifi transceiver that connects with our base station with a steady and powerful radio link. Among all the noise, our signal stands tall.”
For the project, “Ruckus is the prime participant”, he says, and other vendors include Cisco, HP and Alvarion.
“The aim was not just to create a link which is strong day in, day out, in every single building and every single apartment in every building. We needed a very responsive technology partner that understood our requirements and that could create new features. Ruckus has been very responsive to our needs.”
Tikona uses 60 megahertz of bandwidth in the 2.4 gigahertz band to operate between base stations and customers — that’s 24 times the licensed spectrum MTS India survives with. Another 50 megahertz of bandwidth in the 5.8 gigahertz band is for backhaul, connecting to an extensive fibre backbone passing through all the neighbourhoods in the coverage area. “So with 110 megahertz we are delivering wireline-equivalent services.”
Today the company has 43,000 base stations in operation: “that makes us the largest outdoor wifi network in the world”. One base station can serve 100 to 200 customers. “The limiting factor is the backhaul. You have to have the horsepower in the backhaul.” The fibre backbone, of course, has essentially unlimited capacity, and a second channel can be added to the 5.8 gigahertz radio-based backhaul from the base stations. 
                   
                   
Early troubles 
                   
The first year was a struggle, Bajpai admits, largely because Tikona was pioneering a new architecture. “It took us nearly 18 months to perfect this architecture in a scalable way. We now have a very stable network.”
There are still problems: Indian cities do not have stable power supplies and “a lot of the hardware gets burnt” as a result, “leading to service outages”, he says. “We are continuing to work with our technology partners to make our hardware more protected and more reliable.”
But the radio is good. “We are delivering two megabits a second up to four megabits. Business customers can get five or 10 megabits or even the equivalent of DS3 — defined as about 44 megabits. As well as its residential and business customers Tikona has “500 very large corporates behind which you’ll find thousands of users on the LAN”. The company also creates managed wireless LANs for company campuses, he adds. “And now we are moving into MPLS VPN delivery.”
For consumer services, one base station can support 100-200 customers, he says.
It could have been better. In that troubled first year Tikona had a high churn rate because of its technical problems, he admits. “We were still learning the trade. If we had kept them [the initial customers] we would have had 400,000 customers by now. The environmental problems continue to be the challenge.” Water got into some of the equipment during monsoons, though suppliers have helped to improve the waterproofing since then. 
                   
                   
Central operations centre 
                   
The radio side saw what Bajpai calls “some interesting work” which have led to the creation of a central network operations centre in Mumbai. “We manage through our NOC approximately 200,000 customer radios and close to 60,000 network radios all from the central location. It is probably one of the most complex radio networks in the world. This is an end-to-end IP network. It’s hard to find this kind of architecture in any other telco.”
The nearest equivalent networks are the wifi hotspot systems that companies such as AT&T operate — but they work in a very different way to Tikona’s. “We are providing the equivalent of a DSL connection in your home. We are asking people to pay for this — it’s not like a hotspot in Starbucks, where if it works, it works. What we are trying to do is quite unique.”
Tikona is keen to expand to “maybe hundreds of cities”, but needs finance to fund 200,000 base stations and the required customer equipment. “The current capacity of the system is two million residential broadband customers,” says Bajpai. “We are not yet profitable, but by the time we have 350,000 customers we will be profitable. We are on the journey now.”
After Bajpai gave his interview with Global Telecoms Business, the Malaysian operator Axiata was reported to be in talks with Tikona’s shareholders about taking a stake. Bajpai did not reply to a request for further comment on this.
Meanwhile the company is even looking beyond wifi, to the possibility of using LTE is deliver wireless broadband to five districts of India with a population of 300 million. But clearly that, and the expansion of the wifi system, have to wait for the funding.
There is potential for similar networks in other countries, says Bajpai. “It was a question we got from day one. If you can do it, why can’t others?” But solutions based on wifi “are not in the DNA of large telcos,” he says. But despite the initial problems he appears to have found a solution to delivering broadband in a country with little fixed infrastructure, and — so far — little spectrum for conventional mobile broadband. GTB

Further reading from Global Telecoms Business: 
Axiata plans buying stake India's Tikona 18 Jan 2012
India's broadband plans hit by lack of spectrum, says MTS's ... 10 Nov 2011
India to soften operator merger rules 04 Nov 2011