Mettle Networks, a telecom products company serving the ISP/broadband industry and based in Technopark here, has been included in the prestigious Gold Category of the 2021 Intel Winners’ Circle.
There are only a few Indian companies that are into the development of telecom products in India, says Anil Kumar K, Co-Founder and CEO, Mettle Networks, which has been offering networking products since 2012.
“Broadband networks are a strategic infrastructure of any country just like power grids, and broadband network gateways (BNG) are at the heart of this infrastructure. BNGs handle all the broadband traffic from end-customers, offices, businesses and private networks, all at one point,” Anil Kumar told BusinessLine.
A BNG with its intellectual property rights solely owned by an Indian company will allow strategic autonomy in this crucial infrastructure for India. Its importance will be more relevant as more and more parts of the economy rely on the internet and cyber infiltration remains a major offensive tactic.
Growing capacity demands
“Mettle Networks is poised to play that role, meeting the growing capacity demands,” Anil Kumar said. Mettle had realised in 2016 that available products in the market or concurrent approaches in the industry then may not scale enough to meet the exploding demand in the future from the industry.
“Our search for an engineering solution to meet the anticipated situation took us to virtualisation approaches. Our study and research convinced us that virtualisation would revolutionise the way telecom capacity is going to be built because of the flexibility and scalability it offers,” Anil Kumar said.
“We turned our attention to broadband services and went to the drawing board. Over a period of 18 months, we came up with a prototype. Our proposal was to build a virtual BNG that had near zero dependency on specific hardware brands,” he added.
Its first large deployment was with a pan-Indian ISP that operates across the States of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Hyderabad. Mettle vBNG is now in the process of completing its field trial at many small and medium operators across India.
Inclusion in the Gold category of Intel Winners’ Circle this year is notable since Mettle Networks happened to be the only telecom products company that demonstrated its capacity to compete with foreign brands in the core network, Anil Kumar said.
Intel leverages the circle to recognise companies across the globe that introduce novel ideas and market-ready products with the potential to accelerate network transformation in the telecom and computer spaces.
‘Driving Gen-Next solutions’
Intel’s Winners’ Circle page says that finalists “have met a set of criteria, including open-source contributions, meeting solution benchmarks, and commercial availability of virtualised or cloud-ready applications based on Intel architecture, edge applications, or 5G integrated solutions.”
Working together with Intel, Winners’ Circle partners drive the next generation of solutions and transform the network from edge to core, the Page says.
