To 3G or Not To 3G
Thursday, March 22, 2007
The DOT officials are pondering over this question heavily it seems, as per Unstrung. It has been months since TRAI recommended a policy and the first trials started. But in typical fashion, the final decision on the spectrum allocation has been postponed from one month to the other. The reason it seems are lots of unsolved issues, but none are mentioned. I guess among them would be that the spectrum in question is being used by the Defence Forces, as was the case with WiMAX.
The intriguing part is how and why WiMAX is playing into all of these. There seems to be a lobby favoring WiMAX driven by the vendors. But again the spectrum released for WiMAX is 3.3 GHz and the bandwidth is 100 MHz. Since this is not the spectrum the rest of the world is using for WiMAX, it means that India will not benifit from economies of scale. So even if we go for WiMAX, will it be really affordable? The rural broadband angle is being unnecessarily played up, I think.
Maybe DOT does not want to go either way. Maybe its thinking about following China as it did with TD-SCDMA. Wouldn't that do wonders for Telecom startups in India!
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The intriguing part is how and why WiMAX is playing into all of these. There seems to be a lobby favoring WiMAX driven by the vendors. But again the spectrum released for WiMAX is 3.3 GHz and the bandwidth is 100 MHz. Since this is not the spectrum the rest of the world is using for WiMAX, it means that India will not benifit from economies of scale. So even if we go for WiMAX, will it be really affordable? The rural broadband angle is being unnecessarily played up, I think.
Maybe DOT does not want to go either way. Maybe its thinking about following China as it did with TD-SCDMA. Wouldn't that do wonders for Telecom startups in India!
Tags:
