Grandstream to supply video phones to Wateen

Grandstream Networks, a hot ATA startup few years back, has secured a supply contract with Pakistan’s Wateen Telecom. Wateen is supposed to be world’s largest WiMAX network lit up by the likes of Motorola and Sylantro. The service provider plans to offer the whole bundle: data, voice, and video.

Grandstream will be supplying its ATAs and video phones. Video phones represent a smaller but emerging line of Grandstream business. The vendor saw video phone sales grow 300% last year. Units figure is “tens of thousands of phones”. Wateen is one of the two tier 1 service providers it is counting on to achieve another triple digit growth in video phones this year. The other tier 1 provider is a European carrier.

When fixed Voice-over-Broadband started kicking in around 2003, Grandstream was at the forefront of the buzz. Then Cisco acquired Sipura and Linksys and pretty much ate the world of ATAs. Grandstream has since diversified into video phones and IP PBXs.

Its video phones are being sold into both the enterprise and residential segments. Wateen also plans to target both enterprises and residential customers for its video telephony service. When we spoke to Wateen during their customer trial period, they reported having setup the network to support upto 1 million WiMAX end points in 22 cities. The network is IMS-compliant. The 500 odd customers involved in trials included several major corporate customers. Apparently over 10,000 customers signed up for Wateen’s WiMAX service within 20 days of its commercial introduction in December 2007.

Wateen wanda bada, wanda bada ... yeh to bada toing hai.