Mobile telephony has permeated almost every segment of people’s lives. At present, the sector is attracting around Rs 1,500 billion worth of investments and has over 460 million subscribers, with more than 10 million subscriber additions per month. As of July 2009, private GSM operators accounted for over 95 million rural subscribers with a growth of 3-4 million per month, implying that nearly 50 per cent of the GSM subscriber additions come from the rural areas.
Connecting India – Role of 3G and Wi-Max
To cater to this vast segment of the Indian population and increase the penetration of mobile and broadband services, 3G offers the perfect solution. This is because 3G will not only help meet the Universal Service Obligation (USO) requirements, but will also help in creating a mass service market without any wastage of investments.
The advent of 3G services will help in providing more personalised services. While voice telephony dominated the 2G technology platform, 3G will give greater choice to subscribers. It is an ideal platform to deliver low-cost voice telephony while, at the same time, easing spectrum constraints on 2G networks, helping accommodate subscriber growth.
3G also provides an ideal platform for developing rural-centric content including applications like telemedicine, tele-education, e-governance, etc. It can help disseminate agricultural information to farmers besides providing them with weather reports, information on seeds, market prices and creation of commodity information portals.
Though 3G is expected to bridge the digital divide, there are various other technologies beyond it that will help take India to a higher level of growth. These include HSPA, long term evolution (LTE) and Wi-Max.
In India, there is a growing need to provide increased connectivity to the masses through internet access, broadband and the web. Like fixed line telephones went personal with mobile technology, fixed internet too would have to follow the same path. The government is taking the right initiatives in this direction, targeting to take broadband connectivity to 100 million users by 2014 from the current level of a mere 6 million users. Wi-Max technology is expected to serve as the primary tool to meet this target.
Today, the average speeds offered by various broadband technologies are in the vicinity of 6 Mbps with the peak user speeds being 16 Mbps. Mobile Wi-Max, on the other hand, not only provides average file transfer rates of about 14.1 Mbps, but due to high spectral efficiency, is the equivalent of 4G technology at 3G prices.
Mobile broadband is increasingly becoming the focus area with emerging markets like India and China expected to account for about 20 per cent of the global mobile broadband subscribers by the end of 2013. Further, in the case of rural areas, fixed line broadband connectivity is extremely low, making a case for mobile broadband. This is supported by a study carried out by Forrester Research in February 2008 according to which 41 per cent of people miss the internet when they are away from their computers, and 50 per cent wish for internet access while they are on the go.
In India, there were 1.4 million internet users in 1998 which increased to 81 million in January 2009. WAN connectivity (Wi-Max, 2.5G and 3G) is expected to grow from less than 10 per cent in 2009 to over 70 per cent in 2013. This also represents a massive swing in the adoption of mobile data services. As more notebooks are getting connected to the WAN, networks which were originally optimised for voice are finding it difficult to keep up, and are getting clogged during peak usage times. These networks not only require greater spectrum and backhaul but also different network architecture. Thus, there is a greater need to adopt Wi-Max technology on a much larger scale.
By 2015, India will have about 500 million internet users, 100 million broadband connections and 100 million broadbandenabled devices. Therefore, there is a large potential for web-based education, commerce, medical, and entertainment services.
In order to make rural India digitally inclusive, state-run operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has set a goal of serving 250,000 rural Wi-Max subscribers across 80,000 villages for Phase I of its rural project, which is slated for completion in October 2009. For Phase II, BSNL plans to serve 675,000 villages and nearly 1.1 million rural subscribers by the end of 2010. It has already launched its Wi-Max services via a franchisee model in three of the larger states and is in the process of launching this service in two other states shortly.
Thus, service providers are taking the requisite steps to reach the rural masses.They have already launched initiatives such as lifetime prepaid schemes, micro prepaid cards, innovative tariff plans and low-cost handsets. Enabling rural connectivity has thus become the highest priority not just for the government, but also for these operators.
C.S. Rao, Chairman, Wi-Max Forum, and T.R. Dua, Deputy Director-General, Cellular Operators? Association of India
