Swedish vendor of integrated service management and access control solutions for WiMax networks Aptilo Networks is seeing considerable traction in the Caribbean region and expects to announce wins in the South American region in the short term, Aptilo's CEO Torbjorn Ward told BNamericas.
The company has deployments with Cable & Wireless throughout its Caribbean markets, Win Telecom in the Dominican Republic, Aruban mobile operator Setar NV, Bahamas incumbent BTC and is working on a deal with Mexican cable operator Cablevisión and Puerto Rico fixed line incumbent PRT.
The eight-year old company has been focusing on Latin America and Africa for the last two years after initially targeting Europe, Asia Pacific and North America. For the last three years, Aptilo has seen growth levels in Latin America above the 45% average in its other markets.
The company has been helped by its partnership with French equipment supplier Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), which already has considerable presence in Latin America and several WiMax deployments.
Other partners include Redline, Alvarion, and Nortel (NYSE: NT).
Aptilo offers a software-based management system for controlling access, use of services and billing.
"Once the person connects wirelessly, the system needs to know who it is, whether he is an authorized user, what kind of services he should get, whether he has paid the bill," Ward said. "Our system is getting the detection from the base station that somebody is out there and wants to connect to the network. What we have is the user data base and subscriber management for everyone allowed and already existing customers."
SaaS
The company has been seeing considerable success offering its service management system as software as a service (SaaS), which represents almost 50% of deployments worldwide.
"What we realized early on was that for many customers, be that large or small service providers, hotel chains, etc, many were not into getting people trained and having their own personnel. They said your product looks good but we would love someone else to run it," Ward said.
As a result, Aptilo has set up three data centers worldwide to provide hosted services: in Malaysia for the Asia Pacific region, in Texas for the Americas, and in Stockholm for Europe and Africa.
"Then rather than buy the full system themselves, people can share the network and that can get the price down," Ward said.
WIMAX HAS ITS OWN NICHE
Speaking from the WiMax World conference taking place in Chicago this week, Ward said that Ron Resnick, president of the WiMax Forum mentioned during the conference there were 1,700 WiMax licenses issued or being issued globally in addition to the 300-400 active WiMax operators today.
Ward said that due to the fact that some governments in Latin America, such as Brazil and Mexico, had dragged their heels in awarding WiMax licensing, the technology has been slow to catch on.
One of the hot news items this week for WiMax was the launch of Sprint's Xohm network in Baltimore which according to Wireless Week, "is the ultimate test case for the technology in North America, even though WiMax is being used by a number of smaller operators."
However, Ward believes that the business case for WiMax in emerging markets is very different to that in developed markets.
In developing nations, wireless infrastructure is deployed for geographic reasons to provide voice and internet coverage to the many areas that lack fixed line infrastructure. While mobile often has high penetration, broadband is very low, Ward said.
In developed markets, the technology has to push more on the concept of advanced 4G connectivity.
On the familiar debate about whether WiMax or LTE will become more dominant, the executive said that "this not a horse race in which there is going to be a winner or loser."
There are a variety of technologies competing to provide fixed broadband to the home, namely DSL over copper or fiber and cable, with both in a healthy state.
LTE is the obvious migration path for mobile operators, while WiMax may appeal more to Greenfield operators.
"Who is winning [between cable or wireline operators]? If you are a cable operator you can only work with cable and if you're a wireline operator you can only work with DSL," Ward said. "My point is that's exactly the same thing when it comes to WiMax and GSM and LTE. If you're a GSM operator you can offer that over mobile broadband and later LTE. If you're not a GSM license holder, you can offer WiMax."
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