Will HSPA bridge India's digital divide?

By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 11 June 2009, 00:06 IST   |    5 Comments
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Will HSPA bridge India's digital divide?
Bangalore: The usage and benefits of High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) technology was the prime focus at the roundtable press conference conducted by GSMA, the global trade association for the mobile communications industry. HSPA is the set of technologies that defines the migration path for 3G/WCDMA operators worldwide. Unlike many other mobile broadband technologies, HSPA provides very efficient voice services in combination with mobile broadband data. Jaikishan Rajaraman, Senior Director, Services, GSMA, says "There is an enormous amount of congestion in 2G networks and Indian 2G spectrum planning has been really ad-hoc. There is an urgent need of 3G technology in India." 3G refers to the third generation of mobile networks that are capable of handling rich multimedia services, as well as voice calls and text messages. To show the importance and need of HSPA in the country, Ericsson, one of the world's leading mobile set providers connected twelve villages in the southern state of Tamilnadu under "Gramjyoti rural broadband project" to demonstrate the improved productivity and quality of life by bringing HSPA mobile Broadband into rural area. Ericsson deployed three HSPA macro cells that shared towers with existing GSM cells. The network supported 14.4 Mbps downloads, but the pilot used commercially available HSPA terminals that at the time were limited to 7.2Mbps. With the help of this technology, each village could connect in real world conditions at 4Mbps on average. P Balaji, Vice President, Ericsson says, "With the help of HSPA technology, we demonstrated that we could have multiple applications running at the same time. We had classroom e-sessions and medical videoconference session at the same time as people playing around on the internet in the community centre." Eventhough we saw so many advantages of HSPA technology at remote area, Indian government has been totally negligent in making 3G mobile available across the country. Government has delayed the 3G auction to bring more revenue, but it lost $16 billion in the last two years. A. Raja, Union Minister for Information & Broadcasting assured to complete the auction by the end of 2009. Rajaraman says, "With the emergence of India as the second largest telecom industry in the world, mobile broadband has become the real need of the Indian people. But, till March'09, broadband penetration is only 4.7 percent. The country lacks in infrastructure as the available infrastructure can only facilitate nine million broadband connections." Raja assured to give every type of support to GSMA to spread the services of HSPA technology in India. "GSMA is projected to have 100 million mobile broadband connections in India by 2015. Now it is zero," says Rajaraman. This projection seems to be right as today, 80 million people subscribe to mobile broadband services using HSPA technology in over 100 countries. This figure is growing by six million per month. GSMA sees cost of HSPA enabled mobile as one of the important hindrances in reaching to the lower section of the Indian society. Rajaraman says, "We are already seeing handsets available at affordable price. Although most HSPA are used with high end mobiles with high quality screens, cameras and substantial memory capacity, there are growing number of HSPA handsets aimed at the mass market." In the past two years, the cost of 3G handsets has fallen sharply with low-end models now available for as little as $60 (Rs 2814) at whole sale. "We expect the low-end HSPA handsets to follow a similar trajectory," Rajaraman adds.