Sloka Telecom: Technology doesn't always have to be fantastic, it can be very basic

Meet the winner of the Nasscom Innovation Award 2008: Sloka Telecom

Founded in 2004, the Bangalore-based Sloka Telecom develops one of the most compact and cost-effective base stations for the telecom sector. After over 14 years of work experience, Sujai set out to solve real problems in India's telecom space with advanced, cost-effective solutions for broadband wireless, voice, and video applications, for rural and urban markets. There was an opportunity in the base station market where the future was for smaller and cheaper base stations that can save substantial savings to operators so that they can carpet blanket the network with many base stations to give excellent coverage and connectivity.

What are the features of the award winning compact base stations for WiMAX and 3G?
Our base stations are the smallest and also the cheapest. They are all-outdoor base stations and can be installed on towers, poles, rooftops, traffic posts, etc. They do not need expensive AC housing and can cool itself in different weather conditions. Our base station solutions help the operator decrease his capital expenditure by more than 50 per cent.

What was the idea behind this innovation?
The traditional designs for base station are suited for Macro base stations which are quite expensive almost 5 to 10 times more than Sloka's compact base stations. In order to make base stations smaller, their power consumption lower, and to make them cheaper, Sloka came up with a revolutionary and patent-pending architecture called SDBSA. This architecture allows Sloka to use readily available hardware while emphasizing on efficient software algorithms to make them smaller and compact.

Read the full story: http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/mar/18slide1-innovation-woes-india-neglects-product-firms.htm