Ahead of the curve

Hussam Technology Company has been pushing the envelope with its cutting-edge technological solutions, says Mayank Singh

Had it not been for slow data uploads, Hussam Technology Company would never have happened. Says Dr Firas al Abduwani, CEO Hussam Technologies, “While I was doing my doctorate at Delft University in Netherlands, I used to generate one gigabyte of data per day and I needed to share that data with my research collaborators in the US and Brazil. Uploading this data from the Netherlands to the US took 120 seconds to upload in 2002. If I tried to do the same in Oman it would take me four days to upload the same data.” The yawning gap between the ICT (information and communication technology) developments in the Netherlands (or UK) and Oman convinced Firas that there was a crying need to upgrade things in his country.

Starting off
Abduwani forayed into business with a plan to establish a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) in Sohar Industrial Area. AATCO (Ali and Abdul Karim Trading Company) was facing a communication bottleneck between its head office in Muscat and its factories in Sohar. The company had invested money in a state-of-the art ERP system. As the company’s sales team was stationed at Muscat and the production team was in Sohar, the servers at these places were supposed to mirror each other. Theoretically, once the sales team fed an order into the database the production team was supposed to start working on it. The system required a 256kilobit per second link between the two servers. But at that point Sohar only had a dial-up facility that offered speeds of 30 kilobits per second. This forced AATCO to fall back on a manual process − each of these departments in Sohar and Muscat made an incremental backup of the database everyday and sent it by courier to the other place. “So they had snail mail or mule mail when they had a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure,” says Abduwani.

In 2004, the Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRA) gave an in-principle approval for a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) in Sohar Industrial Area to cover the factories as the Royal Decree of 2002 (which liberalised technology related rules) had mentioned that there will be secondary players who could buy bandwidth from Omantel and resell it. The only bottleneck was that the regulations were not ready at that time and it was estimated that it would take three months for the rules to be in place. This window allowed Abduwani to go back to Netherlands to finish his PhD. Once back, he created a business plan and proposed it to a set of investors and Hussam Technology Company (HTC) was formed in 2005.

He found that the regulations were still not in place and the TRA reckoned that it would take another three months for the regulations to be finalised. Desperate to move on, Abduwani got permission from the TRA to do a demonstration of his technology to factories in Sohar. The demo came at a price − the 5 gigahertz spectrum, which was free in the US and Europe, carried a license in Oman and companies had to pay for using the spectrum. HTC paid the spectrum fee for three months and installed the requisite equipment at Sohar Industrial Estate.

“We did the demo and shuttled the video as we were not allowed to transfer data and give individual packages to factories. We connected different CCTVs of various factories to the network, enabling people to shuttle videos on their laptop at speeds of up to 20 megabits. Thus we created a fast fabric that could create a bandwidth for all the factories,” says Abduwani. Finally, after six months of doing demos, HTC gave up the initiative as the grapevine was that the rules would take another two years to be finalised. This proved to be true as the regulations got ready only in August 2007.

MESH technology
The effort though was not a complete waste as the generated domain expertise convinced Abduwani to upgrade HTC from an ISP to a system integrator as there were companies that required a private network to connect their different buildings. The company invested a large part of its paid up capital of RO100,000 in a sister company that invested in US entities with such technological capabilities.

HTC had actually created a MESH network in Sohar. There are three different architectures for wireless connectivity – one, point-to-point like a leased line with the two points connecting directly to each other; second, point-to-multipoint with one base station being accessed by multiple clients, a GSM network being a good example; and third, MESH wherein there are multiple base stations that are interconnected to each other and to the clients’ site. This does away with the need to pull cables.

HTC exhibited the MESH network in various conferences attracting interest from companies like Intel, BTC, etc. One of the clients at that point was servicing the account of H H Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, and they were looking for similar specifications. HTC was asked to replicate the demo done at Sohar at the Palace. The demo was approved and the technology was deployed in one of the royal camps.

Taking wings
Things started falling in place for HTC. Medco, an oil company which had a number of rigs in the Karim West concession area (of around 650 sq. km.) from PDO, wanted to interconnect these rigs. While Medco was contemplating the option of using V-Sats from Omantel to connect their rigs to the head office, HTC offered them a solution based on MeshDynamics’ mesh solution. Says Manoj, senior support engineer, Netcare systems (the company which was helping Medco find a solution), “A V-sat connection at 2mbps speeds was working out to RO10,000 per month. We started looking for a solution that was cost effective and wherein the data transfer would take less time. But could not find one till we found HTC and its Mesh solution.” The company won the deal in face of competition from Omantel and managed to deliver the solution. Five permanent towers with solar panels with wireless equipment and antenna were erected on the site. Two temporary masts were installed on one of the rigs so that every time a rig moved Medco just needed to reorient the antenna to the nearest tower and it automatically connected to the network.

HTC went on to a complete wi-fi coverage for the University of Nizwa using a trapeze solution. “They had a dysfunctional WLAN network which was not fully optimised,” says Abduwani. The University wanted HTC to guarantee its performance and give them a solution that was manageable, scalable and secure. The company installed a trapeze network system which provides wi-fi coverage to students, both indoors and outdoors. This was the first distributed controller system deployed in the Sultanate. The University wanted to track where the system was being used so that it could improve its service and reduce abuse of the system. Says Turki al Yahmadi, network administrator and networking instructor, University of Nizwa, “It is reliable, fast and secure. Though it covers a larger area it is easy to deploy and monitor.”

Free Space Optics
HTC is also the only company in Oman which is approved by the TRA to install Free Space Optics (FSO). FSO is a wireless telecom equipment which is not based on radio frequency but on free space optics or lasers. These laser divers of 1850 and 1550 nano metre wave length are very good for short haul distances of up to 4 kilometres and they provide very high bandwidth of one gigabits of speed. The best part is that being based on light it dies not requires any spectrum licensing.
When Nawras Telecom wanted to try out a new technology as an alternative to Harrup because of spectrum constraints, HTC offered them a ‘try and buy’ offer. As per the offer, HTC was given certain targets and if those were achieved, the technology was considered to be a purchased good. Nawras wanted to see how far the links went plus a one STM- 1 speed (155 megahertz speed). “We commissioned the system 10 days before Cyclone Gonu hit. Nawras wanted to see whether the system works in different weather conditions. They chose the summer season as they considered it to be the worst time but they got the entire range − extreme rain, a tropical storm and the dusty weather that followed,” says Abduwani. The link operated flawlessly throughout the storm.

Post-Gonu, BankMuscat decided to upgrade the link between its disaster recovery centre at Wadi Kabir and its data centre at its head office (in CBD). The bank had connectivity between the two sites but post-Gonu it was keen on upgrading speeds. Omantel offered a fibre connectivity while HTC pitched in with a wireless connectivity. Since wireless distance between the two sites was smaller than the fibre route, it did not have to go through much active equipment. Finally, HTC won the bid and implemented Oman’s longest 1 Gbps wireless link. “The deal worked out to be 96 per cent cheaper than what was being offered by our competitors,” says Abduwani. Clearly, determination and cutting edge solutions have enabled HTC to withstand overwhelming odds to come out trumps.


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