What is your company planning for MWC-2016? What will be the main products you will be featuring?

First of all, we are very pleased to be exhibiting at MWC for the second year running. The main portfolio innovation we will be showcasing this year is the InfiLINK XG, our carrier-class wireless point-to-point solution, which has just been the subject of a number of significant enhancements. We strongly believe that this new family of wireless solutions will generate solid interest from service providers from all corners of the world. What we noticed during our attendance to MWC last year is that attendees to the show were not just geographically spread, but also represented almost all of the vertical sectors that InfiNet Wireless has the capability to target and work with. Thus, for this year, we decided to present our whole portfolio, including the InfiMAN 2x2 point-to-multipoint range of solutions as well as the InfiLINK 2x2, our flagship point-to-point product family.

What is the basis of the demand of your products? What are their competitive advantages?

In a nutshell, our solutions provide fixed high capacity wireless connectivity between locations with no available wired infrastructure, or where running cables of any type is simple not economical. Besides mobile operators using our solutions to connect their 3G and 4G/LTE base stations to their core networks, they are also typically used by Wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) and enterprise customers to provide Internet access or LAN-to-LAN links connecting remote offices and locations to a corporate network or even machine-to-machine (M2M) type of connections in SCADA-type networks, etc.

InfiNet operates in a highly competitive market. It is not in our strategy to be the cheapest of all, but rather we focus on minimizing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for our customers through optimizing deployment and maintenance costs, providing "install-and-forget" solutions, whilst maintaining the desired quality of service and performance of our solutions. We also pay a great deal of attention to our R&D efforts to make sure that the real-life performance of our solutions meets the highest expectations of our customers, whichever market sector they happen to operate in.

You have market leading products, one of these is the advanced version of the InfiLINK XG product that you are announcing at MWC 2016. These give you a major edge over a lot of your competitors – why is that and what are the tangible benefits?

InfiLINK XG is based on a bespoke high-performance Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform. Unlike most of the other solutions which are hardware defined, the XG continues to enhance its radio technology even after it is shipped and deployed. We have just introduced a revamped version of this wireless unit, which significantly improves the performance in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) deployment scenarios, providing better link availability over distances of more than 50 km per single hop, and significantly improving maximal throughput to more than 500 megabits per second by trimming off some redundancies on the physical layer. We have also worked very hard on improving the support of the IEEE1588 protocol, which provides precision timing across packet networks. This new implementation adds the support of a "Transparent clock" mode of operation and improves the accuracy to better than 50 ns, which is without any doubt a brilliant result for a TDD-based system like ours.

Is there an increase in consumption for InfiNet products amongst European operators and also globally?

During the last 3-4 years we have witnessed strong growth for our solutions coming from telecom operators of all types and from around the globe. We have been a large number of examples where we worked together with our key customers and where our solutions helped them improve their own revenue streams, whilst at the same time exceed the level of their customers’ satisfaction and loyalty. Typical examples include service operators branching off to provide reliable Internet access to businesses thus effectively competing with the traditional ISPs, increasing capacity for Wi-Fi networks initially built for 3G/4G/LTE offload, using our point-to-point solutions as a backhaul for their 4G base stations including so-called "small cells", street-level increased-density infrastructure which relieves bottlenecks that are created by a mismatch between the capacity "macro-layer" 3G/4G/LTE networks, as well as helping the demand fuelled by the explosive growth of smartphone applications such as WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, etc. These customer benefits were achieved mainly because we were able to offer them carrier-class and reliable wireless solutions against other technologies such as optical fibre, licensed microwaves and millimetre wave radios which are often deemed too expensive or simply take too long to deploy.

What other specialist markets does InfiNet operate in?

Besides telecom operators, InfiNet Wireless’ solutions are being deployed in large volumes with WISP’s, numerous public safety and video surveillance projects, as well as enterprise networks such as ones serving SCADA systems.

How does this relate to your growth plans in the next year or two?

We anticipate to see steady growth in the WISP segment of the market on a global basis because these specific service providers are looking to upgrade their existing backhaul links to higher capacity ones and more spectral efficient solutions, something we do very well with our InfiLINK XG portfolio. The same applies to our latest point-to-multipoint wireless offering, which has been developed with scalability in mind and which will be able to serve more customers at higher speeds within the existing allocated frequency spectrum.

Telecom operators will be the biggest area of growth for our company because outdoor small cell deployments will eventually take off in a very big way, and in turn will require a huge quantity of wireless backhauls, and the XG is a perfect fit for this specific application.

The enterprise market will probably remain at the same level because current volatility in the crude oil market is a major showstopper, forcing corporates of all types to first seek improvement to their existing productivity and efficiency, before investing heavily in "digital oilfield" projects, an area where we have gained very good traction over the past few years. 

How important is MWC for your business?

The previous show was a surprise for us. Not only because many of the leads we generated over the 4-day event turned into real business, but also because it is simply the industry's biggest networking opportunity for telecoms and IT related companies like ours. So we are most definitely looking forward to this year's MWC in Barcelona!

 CommsMEA, March 2016