Kamal Mokrani, Global Vice President at Infinet Wireless speaks with Teletimes in an exclusive interview
Khalid Athar: How is Infinet Wireless doing in its international business? What new markets are you approaching at the moment?
Kamal Mokrani: I am personally directly responsible for the international business of the company. So, I’m always looking for areas where we can grow our business, and, certainly, we have achieved some major success in certain parts of the world and the pandemic itself has created quite a significant opportunity for us because of the explosion in the growth of remote working and remote e-learning. We have a lot of sales, business development and marketing efforts going on in countries like Mexico, which has become a significant target for us. We have secured a very large project to link up 4,000 schools and this was almost like a pilot project for us, but it’s significantly big and pilot of one particular state in Mexico. And later, we’re going to be deploying it in all states. So this is, potentially, a market that is going to help us grow maybe three or four times the size of what we’ve been doing so far.
Khalid Athar: What do you think is the key to Infinet Wireless’ success in the wireless solution industry?
Kamal Mokrani: Unlike many other companies maybe who try to diversify too much, we have taken the conscious decision to stick to what we know best. We have a lot of expertise in the wireless communication space in developing and designing protocols; delivering as much capacity as possible whilst reducing the spectrum used for that. Spectrum is a valuable resource, and we try to get our customers the best performance using the limited spectrum that they have.
Khalid Athar: Why are flexible wireless networks crucial for the industry 4.0 era?
Kamal Mokrani: Our designs are SDR “software-defined radios” – What does that allow us to do? It allows us to provide exactly what you mean by flexibility. We think we know what’s going to happen over the next few years. But we’re building platforms today that will allow us, through changes of software, to adapt the products to new requirements. If you look at IoT, for example, which is a term branded around by so many people, there will be millions and millions of additional devices wanting to access. We do not know, and nobody knows today, the true impact on the infrastructures. So, we are preparing ourselves such that if today we do one gigabit per second, for example, with product X, we would like that product through software changes to do 10 gigabits per second, in three to five years’ time, depending on the requirements. This flexibility is key to Industry 4.0.
Khalid Athar: What is your approach towards partnerships for growth? Are you looking for new partners?
Kamal Mokrani: We are constantly looking for new partners. The reason for that is our business model is based on working with partners and with system integrators. The products that we provide can fit in any sector of the industry. I’m not saying we are in all of those sectors, but there are specific ones that we need to find new partners for. For example, the project I mentioned in Mexico is with the state of Jalisco. There, we, effectively are working with the Ministry of Education, which is not one of our core target sectors, but by securing this project, we effectively expanded into a different sector of the industry and which means we needed to find new expertise. People who understand content for e-learning, who understand the challenges of remote working and this has pushed us even more to look at other sectors of the industry. We are looking at things like the mining industry, which has not been a core business for us, but this is something again that we are pushing very hard into. And for that, we always like to team up with people and partners who know that sector of the industry. We bring in the technology expertise and we count on their understanding of the operational challenges that we may not necessarily have ourselves.
Khalid Athar: What advice would you give to a businessman looking to get into the wireless market?
Kamal Mokrani: I would say now, more than ever before, is the best time to go into wireless. Our company’s slogan is “The Future is Wireless” and we believe in it 100%, and we are investing heavily again. If there is a new entrepreneur that wants to invest in wireless, I would strongly suggest looking at the business model he or she wants to establish. Wireless is a huge market to select the niche where they believe they can add value. This is all about adding value and, I guarantee if it’s done properly, the returns would be extremely high. And this is again, something we are ourselves banking on, in a big way. Watch this space and in the next few months, or a couple of years, we’ll be coming out as well with what I consider truly revolutionary solutions for the wireless industry.
