Airvana will set up R&D centre

Airvana, the $20 million US-based telecom infrastructure provider focussing on enhancing the speed of data access on wireless networks, is setting up its R&D centre in Bangalore. Funded by Gururaj Deshpande, the venture will sell its services initially to CDMA service providers in India.

Said Sanjeev Varma, VP - Marketing & Business Development, Airvana: "Initially we will hire 30 core developers in Bangalore during this year and as and when the Bangalore centres settles down, we will ramp it upto as much as 120 in due course. We are initially investing couple of million of dollars for this operation to start with and we will continue investing further as we expand."

Commenting on the products Airvana has to offer, Varma said that they have signed agreements with Nortel and Ericsson to jointly market their products. Detailing the growth path for this business, Verma said that convergence of the two fastest growing technologies, Internet and Wireless communication, promises to dramatically reshape our society.

"Confronted by the mobile internet's potential and the declining mobile voice revenues per subscriber, wireless operators are pegging their future on 3G mobile internet services," . It is this opportunity to transfer data at higher speed on wireless networks we are cashing in on and we are talking to both Reliance and Tata to offer our services," Verma added.