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Tejas Networks launches India's first optical network product

Fakir Chand in Bangalore

Tejas Networks India Ltd, an optical networking start-up, co-founded by Gururaj 'Desh' Deshpande, the second richest Indian billionaire and founder of the US-based $200-million Sycamore Networks Inc., on Wednesday, launched its first intelligent optical access product called TJ-100.

The nine-month old company has already bagged its first customer in the Bombay-based Tata Power, to deploy the TJ-100 access product for building the first intelligent optical network (ION) in India. The carrier-class optical product brings the power of the ION technology from the core of the network to the access.

Deshpande said that the TJ-100 was a highly flexible family of next generation access products supporting the time division multiplexing (TDM) standards set in Europe (SONET) and North America (SDH) and packet interfaces.

"The Tejas family of products will integrate both transport and switching functions in a compact, power-efficient module that can be deployed in the carriers points-of-presence (PoP) and used as customer premises equipment (CPE)," he said.

Claimed to be the first of its kind to be conceived, designed, and developed entirely in India in the networking area, the ION product's key differentiator is its software-centric architecture. The architecture supports end-to-end provisioning of TDM (T1/E1) and Ethernet connections, auto-discovery of network topology, easy upgrade-ability and a fully functional element management system (EMS).

However, both Deshpande and Tata Power CEO Sanjay Nayak declined to divulge the cost of the order bagged. But they revealed that the price of such products usually ranges from $10,000 to $30,000 depending on the configuration.

Tata Power will be deploying Tejas ION product in its metro network in Bombay. The selection of Tejas Networks to provide an access aggregation solution comes in the light of Tata Power opting early this week for Sycamore Network's SN-8000 Metro Care (MC) intelligent optical transport system. The system leverages the capacity creation of DWDM technology and innovative networking software.

According to Tata Power general manager V N Prabhu, they would use the combined strengths of the solutions from Sycamore and Tejas to build a metro backbone network to offer a variety of high-speed services to support Bombay's growing bandwidth requirements.

"Tata Power plans to be a pioneer in building a state-of-the-art high-speed optical nfrastructure to support India's growing bandwidth requirements. We are building the Metro DWDM network in Bombay, and plan to scale it up to a national broadband network," Prabhu said.

With the Internet infrastructure market growing at about 20 per cent per annum Tejas Networks hopes to market its TJ-100 family of products in the global market. The company plans to focus on US and Europe as their products have been designed to provide full support for both SONET and SDH standards applicable in the regions.

Deshpande also did not disclose investments made in Tejas nor revenue expected in its first full year of operations. According to company officials, the initial investment came from Sycamore, ASG-Omni, LLC and co-founder Deshpande, who also serves as the non-executive chairman.

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