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A colleague of mine sent me this answer from Linkedin I had submitted over 2 years ago. Scary thing is, it is still very much relevant and I have gone forward and have started delivering affordable broadband internet at $10 in over 5 Indian states!
Shivkumar Jagannath’s answer:
Since I am in India and have been associated with the Wireless industry for more than a decade, I will attempt to put things in perspective so far as this country is concerned. a) WiMax in India is a tragedy in making. This is more because of short-sighted government policy. India started off by saying that the WiMAX profile for this country is 3.3GHz a couple of years ago and many operators started acquiring licenses, rolling out networks and so on. Since this was not a popular profile, availability of inter-operable equipment was an issue and uptake was not particularly high. Suddenly the government changed track this year and announced that the WiMAX profile is now 2.5 GHz and all those in possession of 3.3 GHz licenses have to return these and now bid afresh for the 2.5GHz auction. The reserve price for this is now pegged at $200mn. One can only imagine what would happen to incumbents given the current financial scenario. b) 3G is a bigger tragedy in making. The Government has announced auctions for 3G spectrum at a reserve price of $700mn. Given the price sensitivity of the Indian market (only 7% of current 300mn subscribers use GPRS/EDGE), one can only imagine what the uptake on this technology will be. 3G handsets sell upwards of $500 and there are no plan-linked offers in India (Even the iPhone-3G has been launched at $600 and above by two operators). Technologically, 3G will continue to suffer from the same limitations as elsewhere; only it will be compounded in India due to a large number of operators. There will be spectrum spillage, it is thought that most operators will use the 3G spectrum primarily for voice since they seem to have saturated the 2G space. c) Mobile WiMAX will probably lose out in the long run since 3GPP has decided that LTE will be the way to go for mobile broadband. I agree with the views presented earlier that these technologies are not mature enough. To compound it, they are probably simply too expensive to be rolled out in a country such as India. Most people dont know that 80% of India lives in the rural areas and most telecom operators would not touch that market with a barge-pole!! They would rather contriibute 5% of their earnings to a USO fund. Wi-Fi, especially carrier-grade infrastructure mesh Wi-Fi is probably the way to go in India. The reasons for this are: - a) Ultra-Low Capex (license free spectrum, low cost of nodes due to ability to source 90% components locally, low installation costs due to low labour costs) b) Tremendous Agility (ability to relocate nodes, reach newer areas faster) c) Low Opex (Low cost of maintenance, Lowering costs of backhaul) I have often seen many people start off by saying that Wi-Fi is a local access technology and so it must fail. This comes from their personal experiences with home routers and not carrier grade Wi-Fi. The latest network architectures in Carrier Grade Wi-Fi involve a fiber ring around the city (most cities in India have it and it is underutilized thanks to incumbent telcos) with multi-radio Wi-Fi nodes taking egress from the ring around the city. Finally, while the world has been focussing on the US and how muni-wireless has failed, they have not seen the tremendous growth in city-wide, state-wide and even country-wide networks in the developing and emerging markets. i) As an example, the state of West Bengal in India has a Smartbridges powered State-Wide Wi-Fi network connecting over 5000 villages. ii) The entire country of Macedonia is covered with Wi-Fi from Strix iii) The whole of Aceh province in Indonesia is connected with Wi-Fi. To summarize, let us not be led astray by the billion dollar budgets of the WiMAX and 3G Lobby. What India needs is affordable connectivity at around $10 per month. Whichever technology can provide this, will thrive... see more
