India to have one of the largest WiMax base
By agencies   |   Wednesday, 05 July 2006, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: "In the next six years India has the potential to become one of the top broadband wireless markets on the planet," said Sridhar Pai, co-author of the report and chief executive of Tonse Telecom. His remark came after the research released this week by the U.S.-based Maravedis Research and India-based Tonse Telecom said that India will have 13 million WiMax subscribers by 2012, up from today's 1.5 million. "The resulting ecosystem and opportunities will make India a dream destination for vendors and investors," he added. WiMax, a wireless high-speed service, can help fill the gap that has been created due to the lack of intense PC penetration in addition to being limited to about 300 cities and towns, due to the expensive broadband landline service. There are some 15 million PC users in India compared with more than 100 million mobile phone users. With more than 600,000 villages in India with no basic communications services, the possible potential for broadband wireless Internet and voice-over-IP services to expand is enormous.The local players are seizing this opportunity with Bharti TeleVentures, Reliance, BSNL, and VSNL acquiring licenses in the 3.3 GHz range, the spectrum that's being used for mobile data. Starting with modest commercial deployments of WiMax, Adlane Fellah, a senior analyst with Maravedis and co-author of the report said, "Larger deployments will start to materialize in early 2007, but volumes in the millions will take a few years, the planned release of additional spectrum will be critical to this." While the country is gearing up to the possibility of a thorough wireless service, the shortage of spectrum is seen to be posing a difficulty. Most operators currently have 12 MHz or less, whereas license holders will need at least 20 MHz of spectrum to support wide-scale deployments and build profitable businesses, Pai said. Talks are under way between telcos and government agencies, for the release of defense-occupied spectrum for civil commercial use. Another obstacle would be the cost with both service providers and residential end users demand that customer equipment be priced at under $100. Indian startups, such as Telsima and Beceem Communications, are working on this problem. Both the Bangalore based companies have come up with unique ways of tackling the problem. By combining a system-on-a-chip design with smart antenna and radio frequency systems, Bangalore based Telsima has helped lower the costs of deploying wireless services in dense urban, suburban, and rural environments, while Beceem Communications has developed a modem that can deliver Internet data to a laptop at 15 million bits per second. Its engineers are now working on more efficient chips to provide high-speed, wireless Internet access for mobile devices.

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