With increasing pressure in Wireless Voice segment, Telcos are now shifting their attention to data services starting with Broadband where ARPU / Month is ~4 times than Voice. I would like to do a status check on the available Wireless / Mobile broadband technologies in India and their adoption by Telcos and the results they’ve tasted in the market place.
Reliance Communications started the broadband over WiMax revolution in India 2 years ago followed by Tata Communications / Indicom and both seem to have had tough time. Both of these roll outs have happened on 802.16d while the current WiMax spectrum auction is for 802.16e. Tata Communications has mere 50,000 subscribers on its 1,000 base station WiMax network spread across India. RCom declines to give exact subscribe numbers citing competition as the reason but I am inclined to assume its lesser than Tata comm or at the most equal to it.
With increasing number of complaints from consumers and other hurdles in the Wimax waves, both the companies separately unveiled broadband services using EVDO technology on 2.5 G CDMA network. Together with BSNL they have over 500,000 broadband subscribers on EVDO and are expected to add another million with th next 12 months. Compare this to mere 100,000 Wimax subscribers.
BSNL along with Soma Networks and other vendors are rolling out Wimax where they don’t have their copper networks laid. UQ Communications of Japan is bullish on the prospects of Wimax as a user can select from variety of devices and services. UQ may also bid for Wimax license but is of the opinion that for optimal functionality 30MHz of spectrum be allotted to each operators instead of 20MHz. WiMax is mainly backed by Intel and several start ups funded by Intel Capital.
Members of the GSM lobby [Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular] till now haven’t backed any technology but appears that they will be going the HSPA / 3G instead of WiMax. Recently they have asked to bring down the 3G reserve prices in parity with WiMax. Qualcomm has realized the potential of Indian market and has shed its image of arrogance and is working closely with Indian telcos to push 3G.
Who will win the War ? – We do think both of them will co-exist but depending on Government policies and marketing push, the balance can be tilted to some extent. However, at the end of the day customers want performance and Telcos are extremely careful about the price sensitive Indian market before committing a billion dollar 🙂
UQ Communications – Inputs from Business Line – 10/08