UK based ETL Systems is playing an important role towards enabling high quality signals for its customers, with the help of its innovations around RF components. The company was one of the exhibitors at the recently held Convergence India 2017.
Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com spoke with Andrew Bond, Sales and Marketing Director, ETL Systems, which is an English manufacturing company of RF components and distribution devices.
Tell us something about your key priorities, today in the market?
We are a designer and manufacturer of products which are used to distribute and handle RF signals which are being received by a satellite dish that are then passed into a teleport or a broadcaster’s studio for production of TV.
So the important thing for our customers is to make sure they are receiving very dependable signals and very high quality signals so that there are reduced signal points of failure.
What are kind of innovations are you bringing to the market?
The market in India is certainly evolving a huge amount. So what ETL systems designs and makes are RF switch matrices which handle multiple input signals, RF splitters, power supplies, all of which handle L-Band and IF signals which downlink live satellite signals into a teleport so that they can create live TV Programmes.
So, our customers are RF engineers who want to be able to have reliable, dependable signals. If you imagine, let’s say you’re in India, watching live football it is a very big income generator for many broadcasters and they don’t want to have A signal points of failure or B poor quality feeds because they’re being distributed and split to millions of people.
In India lots of direct-to-home operators face this challenge of loss of signal when there is rain for instance, or when there is even less amount of fog in the air. So is there any innovation which you have which can assist with that?
We’re not involved with the link between the broadcaster who makes the programs which they put on there, with their embedded logos and then it goes out to homes. There are four ways that homes can receive the signal, mainly. One is obviously via the internet, IP. The other is via cable, the other is obviously very well known which is via satellite dish, which is common in India and the fourth way is via your handheld PDA device via a telecom network.
Though, what used to be triple play is now quad play in effect. So those devices, some of them can be affected by rain fade, especially satellite. What we’re worried about, is the quality of that signal before it is made into that program. So rain fade, or snow fade or a low horizon satellite all of it, which require in-line amplifiers to be able to boost that signal.
ETL makes a number of amplifiers at different frequencies which we can either give a fixed gain, a variable gain or an automatic gain. So as clouds appear over the horizon a teleport will be compensated by the fact that as the signal attenuates, our amplifiers will automatically compensate for that loss of signal power and therefore they’re always going to get a minus 35 Db signal coming in to their modems so that they can decode that downlink and this is certainly the example, in say, the olympics where we were receiving the uplinks for many many millions of signals from cameras and microphones and data streams and those then come down into a country and are then turned into programs and broadcast out and there you can also afford for your customers to have a loss of signal. It’s a combination of quality as I mentioned and signal points of failure, so we monitor that and we provide solutions for it.
How do you look at the Indian Market today what are your plans to further strengthen yourselves?
The Indian market is evolving greatly and I mentioned before about this quad play that we’re seeing. The Indian market is evolving in that they are receiving signals from new satellites, so they need more satellite dishes to be able to receive more content. In order to make their broadcast or TV station unique compared to someone else’s.
So whether you’re a private or a public operator, you’ve got to provide something that’s different from your competitor and that comes in when you’re downlinking live streams.
So news and sports still is a very important driver for all countries and especially the Indian market. Now for us when we’re providing a switch matrix it allows us the switch between a football match to a cricket match and all these feeds need to be switched very quickly as different sports happen, what we had to provide was power supplies, we had to provide SNMP remote controls, we have to provide RF detection circuits, so that any particular point, so if a module or a component fail the teleport or the broadcaster can activate a redundancy and thats the biggest single thing that I’m seeing in India is that many of these teleports are becoming more professional and are waking up to those sort of requirements.
And with regards to your key geographies, what kind of geographies are most important for ETL?
Satcomms is not a single geography. Because satellite technology is truly global, ETL systems, which is based in England and has 120 people in our manufacturing facility is also truly global. So we have teams of sales people and partners and here we are today in Delhi with one of our Indian partners and we’re operating globally much like the satcomm industry is.
To answer your question, it’s not about global markets, its about specific markets.
So we have four of those, telecoms is very much growing, satellite operators we very much need to monitor what’s going on with their satellites and then broadcasters need to downlink signals and then you have the government and military markets as well because they obviously have their own satellite needs too, we try to cater for all four of their markets. I hope that answers your question clearly.
Can you name your Indian partner you are working with?
We have multiple distribution partners because not all of them sell into those four markets that I’ve just mentioned. Not all of them are telecom specialists, not all of them work with the government or military markets, not all of them sell to other companies so you’ve got to be flexible.
How many distributors do you have in India? What are your plans to expand?
I’m not concerned with number of distributors, concerned with the quality. We work with 3 or 4 good distributors and I wouldn’t want to say anyone of them is more important than the other but that is our strategy.
Any particular innovative product you are exhibiting today?
Switch matrices, L-band signals and they are all titled with the letter V, so we have Victor, Vulcan, Vortex, Valian, and all of those brands are available as different sizes depending on the size of the teleport and the number of themes. We also have a new Rf over fibre range which carries radio frequency signals L-band and IF over a range of 50km to 200km and that is called Stingray and that’s right next to you. We also have a lot of redundant line amplifiers and other signal improving devices which alter slope depending on the length of the cable and those are called Alto. We are not the cheapest on the market but we are high quality. We are a quality supplier.
You mention that you target telecoms, satellite and broadcasters, so in India what is the kind of mix that you have when it comes to your customers?
We have done projects with HITS and in the past we have done projects with Reliance and at the moment we have another couple of projects we are working on which are very large and we are doing this with telecoms and broadcasters.
