Popular mostly among retail users as well as in some corporates, the dial-up modem market in India is currently pegged at Rs 116 crore. D-Link at 45 percent currently enjoys a lion’s share, though Dax and Microtek have also emerged as strong brands in the south and north respectively. 90 percent of the dial-up modems sold were internal, but a healthy 10 percent were still external units. The reasons for this shift: apart from loading the CPU, advantages of internal modems start right from cost benefits to no external power adapters to space saving features and discouraging of amateur troubleshooting.

Apart from dial-up, the leased line modem market, pegged at Rs 120 crore, also saw a significant drop in prices, mostly due to the reduction in the prices of leased line connections. MRO-Tek continues to lead in this segment with over 70 percent market share, selling over 20,000 leased line modems. However, the segment is unlikely to witness much growth due to the crash in prices of modems. The growth rate has been poor because of the delays in the broadband backbones being implemented. Only enterprises and large government bodies are able to afford leased lines in India today, and the market for leased line modems is just these players. Even on the leased line front, players like D-Link and Ascom have made significant inroads.

In the cable modem space, 3Com, Terayon and Scientific Atlanta were the main players while Alcatel, Ericsson and MRO-Tek dominated the show in the DSL space.

EXPERTS PANEL Anand Mehta, marketing manager, D-Link India S Narayanan, chairman and managing director, MRO-Tek Sujit Singh, country manager, Dax Networks