Hughes Escorts plans disaster hub in Bangalore

Hughes Escorts Communications Ltd, leading very small aperture terminal (V-SAT) service provider, will set up a disaster recovery hub in Bangalore by investing Rs 5 crore.

The facility will be commissioned in June and will act as a back-up to the primary disaster recovery hub in Gurgaon.

Besides setting up a 30-city virtual private network (VPN) that will offer secure, pan-India terrestrial connectivity to enterprises, Hughes will also invest Rs 10 crore to upgrade its existing Direcway platforms to offer these services.

Direcway is a comprehensive, end-to-end satellite broadband service. In March 2002, Direcway broadband service was announced by Hughes at an investment of Rs 75 crore. The current investment is part of this outlay.

By the end of this year, Hughes plans to have 500 Direcway centres across the country. Partho Banerjee, president and chief executive officer, Hughes Escorts Communications, said, "The Direcway platform has the capability of providing turnkey bandwidth and managed network solutions to Indian enterprises."

With the second disaster recovery centre, we aim to provide complete business continuity solutions to our customers."

The Rs 200 crore company, which is growing at the rate of 20 per cent, installed 9,000 V-SAT connections in 2003, up 50 per cent compared to the previous year.

Some of the biggest customers of Hughes include Coca-Cola, Hindustan Lever, Nestle, Sony, Aditya Birla Group, Maruti Udyog among others.

The company is actively involved with a majority of banks and state government projects as well.

Conservative estimates of the company indicate that India will have a minimum of 150,000 V-SAT connections in the next five years.

This will include initiatives by the Bharat Sanchar Nigam, government of India, various e-governance projects being undertaken by state governments, retail applications and enterprises.

For the year ended March 31, 2003, India had a meare 20,000 V-SAT connections. This compares with the 140,000 connections in the US by the end of 2003.