Mobile Number Portability is set to enter India and with this Customer Retention is set to assume more significance than Customer Acquisition. Quality of Service in turn will be the determinant in managing customer retention. In India spectrum crunch makes this task doubly difficult. The trend of call drops especially while within building premises and indoors is very widely visible in India. Foreseeing a huge demand to address this concern, UK-based ip.access is on the verge of expanding in India by helping mobile service providers to address in-building connectivity issues.

“India will remain predominantly a 2G-based ecosystem for some years to come. In such a scenario we expect Picocell Technology to serve well to the Indian mobile community,” says Richard Lowe, Sales & Marketing Consultant, ip.access while speaking to TelecomTiger.”Moreover over 75 % of calls made through the mobile medium end up indoors where spectrum is not able to reach as ideally as one would want it to. We therefore are banking on strong demand from Indian operators for our solutions,” adds Richard. He goes on to add that there is a significant demand from the enterprise segment as well to have seamless connectivity while being indoors.

Unlike conventional in-building solutions which makes use of repeaters, ip.access is banking on Picocell technology to offer what it says will be a cost effective as well as efficient way of addressing in-building issues. Moreover the small sizes of Picocells make deployment easy and quick.

The firm claims to have already clinched deal with two Indian operators since setting foot one and half years back and is now aiming to increase its headcount to 15-20 in India. Globally the firm has strength of about 250.

Interestingly the privately held firm among other investors has both Qualcomm Ventures and Intel Capital investing in it. This is indeed a rarity as Qualcomm and Intel are battling it out in the mobile broadband front. 

While the company plans to import the solutions directly from its Mexico manufacturing plant to the Indian market, ip.access says the solutions will be reengineered to provide customization as per the needs of Indian operators.

ip.access claims to have over 40% share in terms of Picocell shipments recorded for the year 2008and is now aiming its gun in the Asia market where Picocell shipment is estimated to rise at a CAGR of 51 % till 2013.

ip.access says it does not feels threatened by presence of Chinese vendors such as Huawei or end-to-end solution providers in the space.”Our niche focus and technological differentiation will help us carve a unique position for us in the market,” winds up Richard.