India will hop and skip to superior tech

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: About 8-9 years back, voice penetration levels in India were of the order of 2-3 % and people had to wait for a long time to get connected. The telecom revolution which we see today was kick started with the advent of wireless technology which resulted in, India being the fastest growth market for wireless voice. The story is not going to be any different in case of broadband penetration. Once again, we are sitting at levels of 2-3 % of broadband penetration today. With the advent of 3G it is expected to bring in similar revolution in the wireless broadband access space in the country.

Critics may say that 3G is happening in India a trifle late. I think 3G is very well timed for us, as we are now getting close to peaking in terms of the new customer additions in the metros. There has to be something new and exciting to keep the numbers and ARPU’s flowing from these areas as well, and what better proposition than 3G. It brings in another dimension to the mobile market which till now was the fixed line (copper) domain. Apart from this we can take advantage of the fact that operators have gone through the learning curve and maturing of the technology phase and we are there at the right time to reap in benefits of a fairly matured and well developed technology. In fact most of the 3G markets across all developing nations picked up only after HSPA came up as the evolved 3G, however we shall be in a position to straight away launch with HSPA. With the kind of volumes that India offers I do not see any reason why we would not be able to catch up with the other parts of the world in terms of 3G customer numbers within the time frame of next 2 to 3 years.

Another boost that 3G is likely to bring is in terms of off-loading a part of the 2.5 G spectrum especially in spectrum starved areas. We can now have some of the heavy users take on the 3G spectrum, providing us the opportunity to use the space so created in the 2.5G spectrum to add a few more customers as well as improve the service experience.