Ikanos to expand business

Ikanos Communications, which makes chipsets and software for broadband access, said here on Wednesday it will expand its Bangalore-based subsidiary, Ikanos India, to do much of its future development work.

The California-based start-up firm also launched in India its latest chipset, called Fx 100100S-4, that it claimed will allow telecom operators to bring high quality video into homes through POT (plain old telephone) infrastructure.

A bunch of apartments or a large office taking up several floors was a typical location where modems running on Ikanos' "fibre fast" chipsets can be used.

There are different modems "" one type for the carrier end, which say a Reliance or a BSNL will buy and the other at the individual home end, which the operator will supply. The boxes allowed the hi-speed data to travel on existing telephone copper lines, an Ikanos release said.

Ikanos had shipped some four million ports, through tie ups with operators in Japan, Korea and Belgium, used for applications such as real time video conferencing, peer-to-peer file sharing (Napster lovers take heed) and high volume data transfer, the release said.

High speed connectivity was increasing in India and using existing telephone lines to deliver broadband meant minimum infrastructure ramp up for the carriers, the release said.

Ikanos' 80-odd engineers in Bangalore will focus on hardware and software design and development in digital signal processing, analog and algorithm designs.

Ikanos India will also provide worldwide support and marketing functions and aims to double its staff strength in the second quarter of fiscal 2005, the release said.