At a time when global telecom operators are looking for new avenues to grow their value proposition in front of their customers, Siklu, an Israel based next generation telecoms organization is reinventing the mmWave segment and creating opportunities around video surveillance, Wi-Fi and Gigabit-To-The-Home or GTTH areas.
Zeev Farkash, VP Global Sales, Siklu speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the company’s current focus around mmWave and its future plans to target geographies such as India.
What are some of the big priorities for Siklu today?
Siklu’s top priorities are to increase our market share in existing markets by penetrating new rapid-growth market segments, and to expand into new geographies. The new markets in which we have already started to work are video surveillance connectivity, WiFi connectivity and residential access (Gigabit-To-The-Home or GTTH). The new regions into which we are targeting to expand our business are SEA, Africa and LATAM.
India, in particular, holds great potential for growth over the next several years. In order to accomplish these goals, we will need to maintain our leadership in the mmWave market with an extended and affordable product portfolio that optimally meets a wide range of applications.
What are the key geographies for the company today? How big would be the market that you are addressing?
Siklu’s current key geographies are North America, Russia and Europe. Siklu operates today in several market segments, including the wireless internet services market, video surveillance and GTTH. Each market segment has the potential to grow substantially, potentially reaching over $1B in the next two to three years alone.
mmWave is a quite an interesting area as it holds great potential which is yet to be unlocked – however, there are many geographies where millimeter wave is still not opened up. In such a scenario, how does the company look towards growth?
Though mmWave is a relatively new technology, we have seen significant growth in its adoption for new applications. Initially, the technology was primarily used for backhauling in the operator and WISP markets. Today we see a growing interest from other markets, including security, WiFi and GTTH, as I mentioned.
Since its early market arrival, Siklu has been unique in redefining the value proposition of products, and in unlocking market segments for mmWave technology. Prior to Siklu’s introduction to the market, the technology wasn’t an option for some due to price, size and mass production ability.
In addition, we see that more and more countries are opening up regulation for mmWave frequencies, mainly in Asia and Africa. This only adds to the potential growth in the total addressable market for mmWave technology.
There has been steady growth in the adoption of regulations in the past years, and the spectrum shortage for dense wireless solutions is driving regulators to consider mmWave and higher frequency options like Siklu’s.We saw thishappen in Brazil last year and in India, where the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), wireless planning & coordination (WPC) and Department of Telecommunications (DOT) are working on this, as we speak.
Operators face this huge challenge of not been able to cope with ever growing data demands and also surge in capacity…how can a company like Siklu help in this challenge?
Siklu can help by leading the way with products that provide the best value – not only in terms of capital expenditures, but also in terms of operational expenditures. Our products are small, easy to install and reliable.
Siklu is also the only company that has found a way to manufacture mmWave technology products using mass production methods. This enables us to deliver not only the solution, but also to scale it according to need – which is especially important for larger operators in Asia.
What is your go to market strategy to reach out to various global geographies today? ideally, what kind of partners work with Siklu?
We believe that our market strength is based not only on the quality of our product portfolio, but also on the strong partner network that we havecreated and will continue to build. We work via local distributors and systems integrators. We have global OEM partners, mainly for the operator market, and also a network of technology partners for complementary products in the different markets, for example camera manufacturers for the security market.
We see great potential for in building DAS solutions or small cell deployments gaining ground in geographies such as India – what according to you are some of the best ways to increase capacity and coverage in a cost effective manner today?
The best and only way to increase capacity is through planned densification of a cellular network. There are many techniques and strategies to carry this out, including DAS and small cells, which may be set indoors or outdoors. The best way to interconnect the chosen densification method is with fiber, but fiber availability differs per country and per area, and fiber cannot reach every cell – even in the most developed of locations.
The only alternative to fiber is wireless, and when we talk about massive densification, connections have to be at the street-level. This is where our V-Band series of small products enters the picture. Solutions are deployed on street fixtures (unlike microwave solutions), and provide high capacity throughput with no interference (unlike WiFi).
How do you look at cloud and virtualization deployment within the global telecoms today?
Cloud and virtualization help save computing and infrastructure resources by aggregating many activities to the cloud. While Siklu is not directly engaged with the cloud and virtualization, we are ready to support the bandwidth demand that will arise with the need to connect more and more remote locations to the cloud.
What are some of the challenges that you are facing and how do you want to address these challenges?
mmWave is becoming a mainstream technology and, as such, is attracting more vendors and large vendors who can bring strong competition to the market. Siklu will have to continue to maintain its unique voice in the market, and to continue to create a competitive edge by offering products that address the diverse and changing needs of our wide range of customers.
