Tata Plans World's Largest Wimax Network
Tata Communications unveils an ambitious plan to become a global leader in wireless broadband by launching the world's largest commercial network.
India is about to become the frontier for high-speed, mobile Internet connections. On Mar. 4, India's Tata Communications, an emerging broadband player, announced the countrywide rollout of a commercial WiMax network, the largest anywhere in the world of the high-speed, wireless broadband technology.
Already 10 Indian cities and 5,000 retail and business customers use the product, and by next year Tata will offer service in 115 cities nationwide. The folks at Tata can hardly contain their excitement. "WiMax is not experimental, it's oven-hot," says Tata's Prateek Pashine, in charge of the company's broadband and retail business.
Of course WiMax is not new. Most everyone in the industry has been talking about it for years. Intel Chairman Craig Barrett has been propagating its virtues in pilot projects across the world, including India and Africa.
Tata Communications has been working on setting this up for a couple of years, and successfully completed field trials last December. It has used the technology from Telsima, a Sunnyvale (Calif.) maker of WiMax base-stations and the leading WiMax tech provider in the world. For now, the technology will be restricted to fixed wireless, but Tata plans to make it mobile by midyear. The company has invested about US$100 million in the project, which will increase to US$500 million over the next four years as it begins to near its goal of having 50 million subscribers in India.
Global tech analysts are will be watching carefully. Though WiMax is prevalent in Korea, the Korean service is a slightly different version, says Bertrand Bidaud, a communications analyst with Gartner in Singapore. It's a Korea-specific pre-WiMax technology called WiBRO.
But the Indian market is where the conditions for a WiMax deployment are the best, he says, because of limited fixed lines. That means Tata has fewer hurdles to overcome. And as WiMax scales up fast, it will give service providers greater flexibility and costs will drop equally rapidly
"If it doesn't succeed in India, it will be difficult [for it to succeed] anywhere else, and Bharti, Tata has been virtually asleep, with a limited subscriber base for its limited product," says Alok Sharma, chief executive of Telsima. "In fact, even with as many as seven broadband providers in the market, the total Indian subscriber base is just 3.2 million and there is no clear market leader. But with the WiMax rollout Tata can gain a leadership position and add a few thousand subscribers a day."
Tata is, of course, going for the heavy-billing corporate customer--a target audience that is beginning to make big investments in technology.
But also important is the ordinary Indian retail customer who can watch movies via WiMax and enjoy Tata's other unique offerings. For instance, users can take in an early morning worship service at the famous Balaji temple in South India. The temple permitted Tata to install cameras so that Hindu devotees from around the world could watch the proceedings in the temple around the clock. To get connected initially, users will simply have to go to a store, buy a router, install it, and then they become instantly connected. It will be as easy as buying apples, Tata executives promise.
The Tata rollout is a chance for India to become cutting-edge in mobile Internet services, say WiMax boosters
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alcatel Lucent sees India, China 4G coming soon
TIANJIN: Telecoms equipment maker Alcatel Lucent said some telecoms carriers in China and India could put out bids for building of 4G trial networks as early as year-end, as they rush to upgrade existing networks or get into the wireless business.
China Mobile, the world's largest carrier by subscribers, has been letting some of the world's top equipment sellers, including the French-US firm, show off their 4G capabilities at the Shanghai Expo that began in May and runs through the end of October.
"The calendar is we hope by year-end the trial networks will be announced, and partners selected and trials will start," Rajeev Singh-Morales, Asia Pacific president of Alcatel Lucent, said in an interview at the World Economic Forum on Monday. "It's fair to say they've been in discussions with us. Everyone knows this trial is coming," he said.
At least two carriers in India, which only recently awarded licenses for 4G, also known as LTE, were also moving aggressively in the 4G space, he added. One of those, Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries, is eager to get into the industry to compete with established players, including Reliance Communications, headed by his brother, Anil.
"Initially, (4G) trials could start in India much faster, possibly by year end," Singh-Morales said. He added a number of carriers lookin at 4G are seriously considering TD-LTE, one of several variants of 4G being developed and promoted by China Mobile. In particular, he said, companies that operate networks based on a high-speed wireless technology called WiMax would be most suitable for the Chinese homegrown standard, which China is actively promoting as it tries to gain a place alongside more widely accepted standards developed in the United States and Europe.
"(The Indian carriers) are certainly actively considering TD-LTE," he said. "Anyone that has deployed WiMax and wants to go to LTE would consider that ... a number of customers in Japan, Indonesia and even the US."
Separately, Singh-Morales said India was currently in public consultation with telecoms equipment makers over draft new rules designed to ease Delhi's concerns over network security. The equipment makers worry that the rules as first introduced would be difficult for them to implement, and are hoping to reach a middle ground with the government.
"There's a two-month consultation period, and then they will issue revised regulations," he said. "I'm confident we'll find a reasonable compromise."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Motorola To Test 4G In India
While India is preparing itself to get immersed in 3G mobile telephones, the US Mobile Manufacturer, Motorola, wants to take a step further by testing the next gen telephony, 4G, in India. If this testing comes into effect, then it will the government’s plan to raise Rs 35,000 crore from selling radio frequency for 3G.
Motorola, which has already done the testing for the next generation technology, known as the Long-Term Evolution (LTE), has plans to kick off its trial services of 4G. According to Motorola, the 4G telephony has the potential for offering 70 MB per second (Mbps) download speeds on a mobile phone, which it plans to launch by end of 2009.
The company is planning to request the Department of Telecom (DoT) for a trial spectrum, Mr Subhendu Mohanty, a senior executive with Networks Mobility Business, Motorola India, told.
But this step of Motorola will cause the telephone operators who are planning to launch 3G telephony, to slow down their plans, leading to the complete spoiling of government's plan to mop up Rs 35,000 crore from auctioning the 3G spectrum.
Asked whether Motorola is talking to operators, Mr Mohanty said: “We would like to have trial with the players but the technology can also be tested on our own systems.''
Besides Motorola, other telecom vendors are also in the process of trials, industry sources said.