Twin tracks to broadband business
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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The decision to auction 3G telecom services sets the nation on the broadband path
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WRITING A ROADMAP: The mobile clinical assistant developed on Intel architecture by motion computing bridges the patient-hospital gap.
THE TELECOM Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) did not put it quite as bluntly as the football star (Cuba Gooding Jr) who challenged his agent played by Tom Cruise in the film `Jerry McGuire' with words that are now a catchphrase: "Show me the money!"
But that is what the Authority said to the nation's mobile operators, when it announced an auction of spectrum for 3 rd generation telecom services in three bands: 25 megahertz, 1.25 MHz and 450 MHz band. The first band caters to services to customers of GSM cellular telephones; the other two will meet the requirement of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology.
Big bucks
The sale of bandwidth will generate something like Rs 6000 crore, so clearly `3G' — the cellular route to high speed voice-data-video sevices — means big bucks for all concerned, and a clear route-map to a broadband future.
For GSM and CDMA users, broadband means upgrading to 3G, expected to push data rates up to 14 MBPS. GSM uses what is known as HSDPA or High Speed Downlink Packet Access. CDMA2000 on the other hand, follows a technology called EVDO or Evolution Data Optimized and ultimately to EVDV or Evolution Data and Voice.
Both may have to fight it out in the market place with a cheeky new upstart: WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access), a wide area broadband technology that straddles both fixed and mobile wireless.
Extends the range
It extends the range to some 50 kms. It comes in two flavours : 802.16d ( fixed) and 802.16e ( mobile) . Mobile WiMAX is claimed to be 10 to 30 times faster than 3G. The coverage is about the same for WiMax and 3G. Mobile WiMAX is still evolving; to that extent, it can be said to be less ready for the mobile market place than 3G.
The other advantage today's cellular players — both GSM and CDMA — have is that 3G involves only incremental upgradation, not a knockdown and rebuild option.
The WiMAX Forumtouts the ability for new entrants into the telecom arena to leapfrog over the 2G stages of cellular telephony into the broadband options offered by WiMAX.
Fair enough — but it means another spectrum allocation — quite different from that required for and recently released in India for 3G: WiMAX works in a higher band than mobile telephones: 10 - 66 GHz.
WiMAX adherents expected to get their foot in the broadband door, with wireless services to fixed customers at home and and in office, with high speed Internet Access, before moving to mobile applications.
It can deployed seamlessly on top of existing cellular infrastructure.
In short, Mobile WiMAX has the potential to seriously disrupt traditional cellular business when it comes to broadband.
But today it is clearly a broadband data technology, just as 3G and when it comes to Indian customers sometime next year, it will ride on the back of existing voice-and-data cellular services. So for the time being at least WiMAX and 3G can cooperate rather than compete for customers of broadband.
Straddles both options
Which is why leading Information Technology players like Intel and Microsoft, see in all this, an opportunity that straddles both options. Intel announced its first system-on-a-chip to support mobile WiMAX applications, with 10 leading telecom equipment manufacturers signing on to deliver products in the next six months.
With one hand the company is writing a roadmap to scale up its mobile technology from WiFi to WiMAX. The other is shaking the hand of the world's leading mobile handset maker, Nokia, to deliver integrated wireless broadband using the latter's 3G technology in the upcoming Centrino Dual core processors for mobile computers.
Intel recently showcased a mobile product for the health care sector — a Mobile Clinical Assistant platform to help ease clinician workloads.
The next Windows version, Vista, is widely expected to come with enhancements that will enable users to seamlessly communicate across multiple broadband options.
Motorola, meanwhile is experimentally deploying its Canopy wireless network technology for a number of meaningful applications — in Rajasthan and across Pakistan.
Beceem Communications, a U.S.-based company co-founded by Stanford University's Arogyaswami Paulraj, was first in the world earlier this year, with WiMAX chipsets for mobile terminals.
As India opens up its wireless spectrum to the white heat of broadband competitive services, it may well emerge as the world's testing ground where these multiple technologies will face their biggest showdown - and the inevitable shakeout.
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