13 million Wi-Max subscribers by 2012

Research firms - Maravedis and Tonse Telecom re-leased a new market study
entitled 'India Wireless Broadband and Wi-Max Market Analysis and Fore-casts
2006-2012' that pro-vides an in-depth review of current regulatory and overall
wireless market trends in India.

According to Maravedis there will be 13 million Wi-Max subscribers in India
by 2012. “More than 70 per-cent of Indian households do not have access to
fixed wired telephone services. Instead, customers have flocked to cellular
phone carriers, which have built a tremendous infrastruc-ture to provide service
to more than 100 million customers,” said Adlane Fellah, Co-author of the
report and Senior Analyst, Maravedis Inc.

For Wi-Max to prosper in India, license holders will need at least 20MHz of spectrum while they currently hold 12MHz or less Sridhar Pai Co-author of the report and CEO, Tonse Telecom

Broadband services were launched in India in 2005. ADSL services now cover
300 towns with 1.5 million connections while broad-band wireless subscriber
figures are still negligible. In a country where monthly broadband ARPU is
estimated at $8-10, and computer penetration is still at around four percent,
BWA/Wi-Max adoption will depend on low cost end-to-end pricing for connectivity
including the compute platform and CPE. The Indian telecom sector operates in a
volume-driven market. If Wi-Max is to succeed it will only be on the premise of
huge volumes and not small deployments.

“Bharti TeleVentures, Reliance, BSNL and VSNL (Tata Group) have all
acquired licenses in 3.3GHz range and are in various stages of trials and modest
commercial deployments. Maravedis has gathered evidence that larger deployments
will start to materialize in early 2007 but volumes in the millions will take a
few years to materialize. The planned release of additional spectrum will be
critical to this,” explained Fellah.

“However, shortage of spectrum is a serious obstacle for massive adoption
of broadband wireless and Wi-Max in India. For Wi-Max to prosper in India,
license holders will need at least 20MHz of spectrum while they currently hold
12MHz or less. 20MHz is a minimum to support wide scale deployments and hence a
profitable business case,” added Sridhar Pai, Co-author of the report and CEO,
Tonse Telecom.

The government appears to be serious about solving the problem by releasing
some of the spectrum from the departments of space and defense and the TRAI is
currently engaged in a critical public consultation. Wireless adoption is
essential if the government wishes to meet its ambitious plans.

DQW News Bureau Bangalore, July 21