"There is a huge demand in South-East Asia and we are also hoping that the Indian market will open up soon for the DTH,'' Mitra said. HFCL would fit in the conditional access (CA) requirement to suit operators. While 100,000 numbers are being targeted the first year by way of sales, pricing is supposed to be HFCL's best bet. The product would be priced approximately at half the cost of imported products. Currently there are no indigenous manufacturers.

Basically the company will be importing the chips and do value addition on software and radio frequency, which is cheaper to do in the country. HFCL is making radio equipment using surface mount technology and this line will be used to manufacture the set-top box.

Meanwhile, the company has tied up with a Trivandrum-based organisation under the aegis of the Ministry of Information Technology to do development work for set-top box for cable modems. This project which was a recent one will take another five months to go on-stream.

The main objective of the company after these two initiatives is to devise one set top box which would handle multi-functions - cable modem functions, DTH, terrestrial satellite, or voice over IP, video on demand.

HFCL also manufactures state-of-the-art coaxial cables with 750 mhz amplifiers against the 350 mhz offered currently used in accessing Internet on cable. This network is of international standards complete with network management systems in place. There is to be a further upgraded to 1 gb.

HFCL's turnover for the current year is expected to be around Rs 580 crore with 50 per cent revenues each coming from turnkey and manufacturing operations. The order book position is Rs 2000 crore to be executed between a period of 6 months to 2 years. About 5 per cent of the company's turnover is spent on R&D.