Today, people are swiftly shifting to digital platforms for most of the need. The huge demand of digital content among Indian customers has fuelled data consumption on newer heights. The players who are into providing internet services are overwhelmed with growth of this market across India. SugarBox is one of the emerging market player in India currently who are changing the definition of data delivery. It connects consumers without being connected to the Internet by enabling innovative technology solutions. To know more about this innovation, We interacted with SugarBox co-founder and CEO Rohit Paranjpe. He shared real insight about the solutions and market opportunities with Rajiv Ranjan, Editor & Publisher, Digital Terminal. Read out the excerpts below:
Rajeev: As the services that you are offering are quite different, so how did you get the idea of starting such unique venture? What were the challenges that you faced in initial phase while setting-up this business?
Rohit: SugarBox started at the back of my experience running an OTT service and the problems that people faced with respect to data reliability and affordability. Jio, for a brief period, solved that problem. But we inherently knew that being a global issue, something needed to change fundamentally to solve this in an economically viable and sustainable model.
We built a prototype very similar to what you find in a Vistara aircraft today, back in 2016 and carried out a pilot at Goregaon station. The statistics were incredibly promising with people consuming 21 GB data per week and some users ran through all 200 movies on the platform within 15 days. This is when we knew we were onto something exciting and the next logical step was to approach a large content house to bring on board and launch this platform at scale.
Zee saw the opportunity that we were trying to tap in to and the Zee leadership team saw larger synergies in what we were doing and SugarBox was acquired in April 2017. Post this, our core focus was to integrate Zee5 (Zee’s OTT service) work using SugarBox, rather than creating a separate platform with a limited use case (Our network is limited only to certain places). When we started the Zee5 App integration is when we fully understood the mammoth task at hand.
Delivering content using a hyperlocal Content Delivery Network (CDN) server was quite straightforward. Making a digital service work without internet connectivity seemed like an impracticable feat. It meant addressing user registration, personalization, security, payments, ads and other App functionalities – all of which require sustained internet connectivity or access to cloud infrastructure to function. It is going to sound like a cliché, but the only way we got past these hurdles was perseverance & hard work, a lot of creativity & innovation coupled with the technical prowess of the team and patient support from both the Zee leadership & the Zee5 team.
As we started rolling out beta releases of the platform across public transport, public places, hospitality, retail and rural areas, it was evident that the core problem was with last-mile connectivity. The problem with the internet networks are one; they’re expensive, second; they’re licensed and controlled, which makes them limited and third; their coverage doesn’t meet the consumer demand, especially in certain geographies, regions and spaces. We have discovered a way to solve the last mile connectivity problem, making digital services more available, affordable and reliable and that is what SugarBox is all about.
Rajeev: How does SugarBox App really work to provide content on-demand to the commuters?
Rohit: Let me start by saying, it’s not just content on demand that we provide. We provide digital services on demand! SugarBox is a hyperlocal CDN – we deploy CDN Edge nodes at a point of consumer presence. Due to this unique architecture, we can expose the Edge node to a consumer over a local Wi-Fi / local area network. This eliminates the users’ dependence on mobile data and provides them seamless access to Digital services that use the SugarBox CDN, without any usage limits or mobile data charges.
To access the SugarBox platform, a consumer connects to the SugarBox Wi-Fi. The consumer can then explore and access all digital services and Apps that are available at that SugarBox CDN Edge node. Users will be able to stream and download video, music & other content using various OTT Apps, play Games, access News Sites and E-learning platforms, shop on E-commerce platforms, order food using food delivery Apps, book onward transport using Cab aggregators and more; without any data buffers or attached data cost. We are also working on integrating all of these services on a single platform, the SugarBox App, to make it easier for the consumer to discover and access features across these services, but the choice will always be with the consumer on using the App of her choice.
In theory, SugarBox Edge nodes can be set up at any place which is characterized by a critical mass of users consuming digital services. However, our core short term focus is public transport, where the consumer need is magnified, and access is otherwise limited due to unavailable or unstable networks.
Rajeev: Please brief about the projects where you are currently providing this service. What response are you getting from the existing user base?
Rohit: Hyderabad Metro, Chennai Metro and Navi Mumbai Municipal Transport are the key projects where we are currently providing the service. We are also present at a few Gram Panchayats as a part of the Digital India movement. In Jan 2020, RailTel selected us to deploy SugarBox Edge nodes to power all trains and Wi-Fi enabled stations pan India, which will be completed in phases by 2022.
Across all our pilot projects till date, we have catered to over 1 mn users. In Feb 2020, the month prior to lockdown, we had 120,000 unique users accessing Zee5 content with an average of over 27,000 users consuming content daily in Hyderabad Metro. The initial feedback has been very encouraging with an average engagement of 14 out of 30 minutes in the case of Hyderabad Metro. Of course there is a lot of work to be done and the key focus at the moment is to partner with Digital services across industries, which incrementally adds to the consumer value proposition.
Rajeev: Which are areas you are offering this service currently? What are your future business plans to expand your reach across all market?
Rohit: Today, we have deployed over 250 Edge nodes across 9 cities. Apart from the key projects mentioned above, we are live across a few hospitals, public places, hotels & co-living spaces in cities such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai. As a part of the Railways deployment, we will scale up our availability across the length and breadth of the country. We are also exploring other key projects across geographies and target to enter the Avionics space very soon.
In the medium term, the focus is to go down to the grassroots, as well as scale to other countries and play a pivotal role in enabling affordable and reliable digital access for the next billion users. As a part of this strategy, we will cover pan India Urban & Rural markets by 2025. The long-term goal is to optimize the way data is transacted on the internet infrastructure globally which will decrease the internet bandwidth consumption and decongest existing last mile networks, making internet access 30 to 50% cheaper and twice as fast.
Rajeev: How do you ensure the safety of user’s data? What all security commitment you offer to your customers?
Rohit: Security of user’s data is critical to us and is at the centre of everything we do. Right from our infrastructure (Edge nodes as well as Cloud infra), services and products (SugarBox App and SDKs), services user data is protected at every stage.
A few key measures and commitments on data security & data privacy that we take are:
