Top five ISPs continues to drive the bulk of the RAS market in India. One bad news for RAS vendors was several leading ISPs exiting last year. Some of the leading players in the RAS market are CommWorks, (now part of UTStarcom), Cisco Systems, Nortel and Alcatel. CommWorks has more than 50 percent of the market share, and its successful run is still continuing. The average price per port of RAS continues to be in the range of Rs 8,000 and it depended on how many ports were purchased.

Dial-up operations became unviable due to falling tariffs and an intense price-war. Caltiger, which shot into prominence with free offer, virtually got out dial up business. With incumbents BSNL and MTNL getting bullish about Internet services, RAS players are in for a good time in the next year. Added to this is the big plans of the Reliance, VSNL and Sify.

Yes, the customer is quite sensitive to issues like stability and redundancy, with the prime parameters here being working of RAS under the Indian environment, MTBF, hot standby modules, such as power supply, control cards, spares modem chips in the system, etc. This further includes soft parameters like backplane capacity (so that system shouldn’t slow down the data rate once it reaches to peak load), time taken by the system to establish the connection, and line drop rates, etc. Customers, especially tier-A ISPs, also take cognizance of system scalability.

However, today, the Indian customer is most worried about return on investment. Many of the smart ISPs have realized that it is better to focus on investing on such products or platforms, which will enable them to quickly deploy a host of value-added services over the dial-up and other access services that are already provided.