As one of the largest privately owned broadband wireless access (BWA) development and manufacturing companies in the world, InfiNet Wireless has maintained consistent and organic growth primarily through its technology innovation and its ability to deliver complete customer satisfaction. With an overall aim to deliver industry-leading performance, unparalleled reliability and lowest cost of ownership in high capacity wireless networking infrastructure, Telecom Review spoke to Kamal Mokrani, global vice president, who shared information about the strategic orientations of InfiNet Wireless.

Tell us about your organization. What do you specifically specialize in?

InfiNet Wireless has been around since 1993. Headquartered in Malta, in southern Europe, we market our range of solutions in all corners of the world. We chose the city of Yekaterinburg in Russia for our R&D base because of the excellent pool of engineering skills available there in all fields of wireless communications.

Over the years, we have deliberately stayed focused on one of our core strands which is not to diversify from what we do best. This has allowed us to reach a position today as one of the three key global players in the fixed broadband wireless marketplace. Just to be absolutely clear, we are not a WiFi manufacturer, nor do we provide solutions in the traditional wireless mobile world. We leave that to other players. Fixed broadband is all about connecting companies and people, wherever they are located, without the use of cables, in various topologies, and giving them faster access to their customers and applications, from 1Mb/s all the way to 500 Mb/s.

In terms of our geographical spread, we are directly present in 16 countries today, with our one of own people and offices, including Dubai which is a major hub for us for the Middle Eastern region. This geographic presence is further extended through our relationships with dozens of local partners located in all continents. At the last count, we have deployed our solutions in over 120 countries, from South Africa to Norway, and from Brazil to China. In the Middle East, our presence is particularly strong in Saudi Arabia, which is our largest and most strategic market in the region. We are also strong in the UAE where we have deployed a number of networks for both corporates and the government, with the most important deployment being with “du”, the leading service provider in the country.

Our company is launching today during Gitex 2015 a number of brand new solutions, one of which is known as the XG Family. This latest point-to-point solution allows us to provide even more reliable connectivity with higher capacity than any other product in the marketplace, and most importantly with the lowest latency one can find anywhere. For those who may not be familiar with latency, let me explain: if you have two sites located far apart from each other, the time it takes for the transmitted data to complete the round trip from one end to the other is known as latency. Depending on the actual distance covered, this can be a few milliseconds or minutes, depending on the technology deployed. If the data being transmitted is voice, the bigger the latency, the more delay for you to hear the voice of the person located at the other end. This can be annoying and may not be conducive to a good and productive discussion.

But when you are transmitting video streams, this latency become even more crucial. At InfiNet, we have developed a range of protocols to mitigate this delay and bring latency figures down to milliseconds rather than seconds. We can claim rightly so that we can transmit any type of digital content (i.e. voice, video, Internet data) over distances of up to 100 kilometres whilst keeping the latency down to two or three milliseconds only. In other words, we are able to provide connectivity over long distances with no noticeable delay.

Does InfiNet Wireless face challenges in the region?

Yes, of course we do, just like any other company. For example, the biggest environmental challenges we face in the Middle East are sandstorms and the ever moving dunes which over time tend to obstruct lines of site between the locations we connect. Similarly, we face incredibly high temperatures in the middle of the desert, mixed with nearly 100% humidity levels in many coastal areas. We have consequently developed a range of outdoor units which not only perform faultlessly in these hot and hostile environments, but also in harsher and freezing conditions such as those one can find in the middle of Siberia. We take environmental challenges very seriously.

If we speak about the Middle East region only, then it is fair to say that each country has its own challenges. A country like Lebanon, although relatively small when compared to Saudi Arabia, has a very challenging terrain with mountains everywhere. We face other challenges in the region, apart from weather and natural landscape, but they are not insurmountable and do not necessitate any significant product re-engineering. Dubai, for example, can be quite a challenge sometimes for any wireless vendor because the technology we provide operates best when there is clear line of sight between the locations to be connected. Our experience in this still-growing and amazing city shows that you may well have a perfectly working connection one day, but for it to stop all of a sudden because a new building has been erected between the locations, thus obstructing  the direct view. Of course we have solutions to mitigate these occurrences; we may need to send one of our engineers to the sites and re-aligh the link, most of the time by simply re-pointing the antennas and bouncing or reflecting the wireless signals off other buildings. Other than this, we do not really face any major issues which cannot be fixed with our technology.

Why is InfiNet Wireless in the top three global wireless broadband vendors?

If you look at it from a purely technical perspective, the simple fact is that we have developed a number of features which other companies do not yet have. For example, we have optimized our technology to carry video streams much more efficiently than anybody else. One has to understand that transmitting voice signals, video streams or data packets require a different approach in each case. For video specifically, not only are we able to compress the signal without loss of resolution, but we have also developed a number of proprietary protocols which allow us to maintain real-time transmission, giving the remote end an almost perfect visual image without pixilation or jitter. These are crucial requirements from our customers, whether they are transmitting football matches as we did in both World Cups in South Africa and Brazil, or for a police force wishing to monitor strategic assets and locations for homeland security purposes. Whilst some of our competitors can indeed provide point-to-point solutions for video transmission, but not necessarily with the same resolution and clarity as we do, doing it in a point-to-multipoint topology is a different challenge altogether, one where we have succeeded numerous times.

The application of transmitting real-time video streams represents around 50 percent of our global business, a clear sign that many customers have found our solutions to be the best ones in the marketplace. This is especially true in Saudi Arabia, where we have a diverse range of customers: some of them in the education sector use our solutions to transmit live lectures given by university professors, others to relay live pictures of a complex operation in a hospital performed by an internationally recognised surgeon, whilst Mecca municipality for example ensure the safety of the millions of pilgrims who gather in Mecca during the Hajj season via a wireless video surveillance network entirely based on our solutions. For all these applications, one needs high definition pictures and videos, delivered through high capacity and reliable links, something InfiNet has become synonymous with over the past few years.

Furthermore, InfiNet always guarantees that data will reach its destination. We have even designed protocols for setting different priorities for different types of data within the same link. A link can, for instance, transmit voice, data and video concurrently, with the network manager deciding which type of traffic is assigned the highest priority. These priorities can even be set to change at specific time of the day or night. A simple example is for a company with multiple locations spread around a city or even country. During the day, the management may want the LAN-to-LAN data and voice calls to be set as priorities, whilst signals from the video cameras installed in and around the offices may be assigned the highest priority in the evening when everyone is gone home after work. Such a scenario would allow the company managers, or a third party security company, to monitor what is happening in their remote and unmanned offices, and raise any required alarms should they notice anything suspicious. This is another aspect of what we do which makes us stand out from our competitors.

How does the UAE market compare to other regions?

As mentioned earlier, each country in the Middle East region has its own characteristics. Some countries have enough state or private funds allocated to their national infrastructures that they are able to deploy state-of-the-art fibre optics networks with future-proof scalability. The UAE is a very good example of this, where most of the large cities have fibre to the home, which we all know is the best way to transmit anything. However, you step out of these cities by not more than 10 kilometres or so, and it is quickly obvious that deploying a fibre-based network there is simply prohibitively expensive. The UAE market is fairly advanced compared to other countries in the region, and is still a significant target for InfiNet, if anything to provide fast and reliable connectivity to rural areas of the country. Of course, we provide many solutions as well within the cities themselves.

The same can also be said about Saudi Arabia, but the sheer size of the country makes our wireless solutions ideal and much cheaper alternatives to fibre optics.

Our next big area of focus in the Middle East will be towards the Oil and Gas sectors. We have, like everyone else, seen a major decline in capital expenditure there because of the very low oil prices, but we expect many new projects to be developed in the coming months and years, which will help us successfully position our solutions for the energy companies.

Telecom Review, December 2015