Soma scores big in India

Little Soma Networks has hit the WiMAX jackpot, announcing today it is rolling out what it believes is the largest WiMAX network in the world in India. Though Soma did not reveal any financial details of the deal, it said India's telecom incumbent Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has tapped Soma for networks in four of Indias states in a rollout that will target 400 cities and towns in the next two years.

The contract is far and away the largest contract Soma has landed to date, and possibly the largest WiMAX contract any vendor has won in terms of footprint size. Soma said the service area for the network will cover 200 million people, twice as large as the 100 million pops Sprint plans to cover by the end of this year. And unlike the Sprint deal, which is divided among three vendors (Motorola, Samsung and Nokia Siemens Networks), Soma is the sole supplier.

At first glance, Soma seems hardly equipped to handle such a massive rollout. The small privately held vendor has made its name as a niche WiMAX player that optimizes IEEE 802.16e gear for new frequencies and fixed-wireless rollouts. The company has sold gear to both big players like AT&T and small operators alike, but those launches have been primarily limited to single small markets and footprints comprising a few towers. Typically the big Tier I contracts have gone to larger competitors like Motorola and Alcatel-Lucent due to their scale and resources, but Soma seems to have turned that common wisdom on its head.

CEO Yatish Pathak said that Soma was the first WiMAX vendor in India and has been cultivating a relationship with BSNL for years. BSNL conducted a year-long trial with multiple vendors in urban, suburban and rural areas, but Soma's FlexMax gear ultimately got the nod, Pathak said (though he declined to name the competition). While Soma in the past has targeted frequencies other vendors haven't yet started paying attention to, this wasn't the case with the BSNL contract. BSNL is using the same 2.5 GHz frequencies as Sprint and Clearwire, which every major WiMAX vendor has developed a product for. Soma went head-t0-head with the big boys and won, Pathak said.

The scale of the deployment would normally tax Soma's limited resources, but BSNL has agreed to work within Soma's capabilities, Pathak said. Soma will contract with system integrators to help deploy the network, and it will rely heavily on BSNL's own network engineers for help in network planning, base station and tower installation and provisioning backhaul. BSNL also runs Cell One, a nationwide CDMA and GSM operator in India, the tower resources of which will be used to build the WiMAX service. Due to the BSNL's incumbent status, it has built fiber to every cell tower, solving any backhaul problems, Pathak said.

"This really is a partnership, rather than a beat-up-on-the-vendor type of situation," Pathak said.

Soma will deploy the network in the Indian states of Gujarat, Maharahtra, Goa and Andhra Pradesh, which include several cities over a million in population, but none of India's megalopoles such as Delhi or Mumbai. Pahtak said BSNL identified those regions as having the greatest growth in middle class--at whom the WiMAX service will be targeted. The deployment will use 802.16e technology and Mobile WiMAX certified gear, but BSNL will be using the network primarily for residential broadband services. India has only 45 million phone lines in a country of 2 billion people, and most of those phone lines can't support DSL. Wireless technologies like cellular and 4G are therefore viewed as crucial to providing basic voice and date services to the populace.