WiMAX has direct correlative to GDP

BANGALORE, INDIA: According to a global study, broadband has a direct correlative to GDP growth of a country. Citing the study, C S Rao, WiMAX Forum (India), chairman, says that if broadband can be accessed through wireless via WiMAX technology, it will add six per cent to its GDP, for every 10 million subscribers. Excerpts from a conversation with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL.

CIOL: How do you look at the Indian WiMAX scenario?

C S Rao: Although we have 450 million mobile phone subscribers, we have a mere five million in broadband, whereas, countries such as China have 200 million broadband connections.

Wireless has shown the way as to how tele-density has improved for telephone access; we have been adding 10-15 million mobile subscribers for voice every month because wireless enables fast connectivity. If only WiMAX is there, we can have connections at the rate of one million per year, in the next 2-3 years, thus touching five million mark in a few of years!

CIOL: There is a take that Indian telecos should have gone for EVDO or HSPA instead of WiMAX. What do you think?

CSR: Every technology has its place in the society. Today 450 million people are using GSM and it is the best for roaming, voice, cable voice call. Also, it is scalable and cheap. It is the best voice technology; however, it cannot support data speed more than 16Kbps.

With regard to CDMA, Reliance and Tata Teleservices put together have 100 million subscribers on CDMA and when compared to GSM, CDMA is better in voice quality with a data speed up to 138Kbps.

When it comes to EVDO – Evolution Data Only or Evolution Data Optimized – it is the next stage of CDMA. EVDO, however, can never have a data speed over 700Kbps because its channel bandwidth is only 1.25Mhz. Thus, in 1.25Mhz one cannot have 700Kbps throughput. At peak rate you can get maybe 2Mbps, however, for very short durations.

Whereas, WiMAX operates on 10MHz channel, i.e. one base station can give you a throughput of 90Mbps. It can give an average speed of 2Mbps, peak of 10Mbps, and sustained throughput of 6Mbps.

WiMAX is wireless mobile WiMAX, or mobile Internet technology. WiMAX is the best for broadband data, compared to GSM and CDMA that are meant for voice and low-speed data. WiMAX is meant for high-speed data and also supports VoIP, to some extend.

CIOL: Why do we need a 3G or 4G technology?

CSR: Today we are having 450 million mobile subscriber in GSM, but we have triple x plus people in India.

We hope that for the next two-three years, 300 million people from rural hinterland in India will also need mobile phone. Thus this country will have 800 million, compared to the present 450 million.

So, in order to serve these many mobile subscribers you need spectrum. However, the available spectrum in the quad band of GSM is already saturated.

So we need additional spectrum and the only spectrum available is in the 3G band, which operates in 2.1GHz band frequency. Around 60Mhz of spectrum is available in 3G. So, if you don't have 3G, then you can't serve them on voice call.

WiMAX has 80Mhz of spectrum, in which we can serve 60 million broadband customers in the country. In the next four years we would have 60 million broadband customers. That is where 4G is coming into place.

WiMAX is all about wireless broadband, and is all about mobile Internet access at high speed. For triple x wireless will solve the problem, providing broadband connectivity at high speed up to 6Mbps at the downlink on the web and at the uplink up to 1Mbps simultaneously, through WiMAX.

3G is meant for high-speed data like WiMAX, video telephony, etc. When you compare 3G with 4G, WiMAX is 4G, but WiMAX is for mobile broadband.

CIOL: Does India need LTE now?

CSR: LTE, as the name itself signifies, is Long Term Evolution. LTE will not be ready anywhere in the world until 2012-2013. For LTE you need new base stations, devices, handsets, and spectrum. LTE doesn't operate in GSM or 3G bands, but operates in 700MHz of spectrum, which is not available anywhere in the country or world over, as of now.

Traditionally, television service providers use 700Mhz. Since there is a demand to switch over from terrestrial to satellite, there is a take that the spectrum band should be given to LTE.

As of now, you don't need certain technologies for voice because there are additional spectrum in 3G in which additional people will be catered to. There will be GSM for 800 million and 4G is available in WiMAX, so we don't need LTE today.

CIOL: How many WiMAX Certified products are there in the market?

CSR: Today there are over 100 models of laptops, which are already WiMAX-WiFi embedded. Moreover, there will be around 1000 devices, which will have WiMAX supportive applications by the end of 2010.

There are five WiMAX device manufacturers, Haris Stratex, Point Red, Beceem, Provis and ICOMM (Hyderabad).

Unlike 3G, where there is only a single chipmaker, Qualcomm, there are at least 25 chipmakers of WiMAX because the latter is an open tangent alliance, like WiFi.

There are at least about 35 base station vendors, such as Samsung, Motorola, Huawei, ZTE, Pageto, MPC, Alcatel Lucent, Nokia Siemens Network etc.

Also there are 30 companies providing PC cards and eight handset device manufacturers, such as LG, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Asus, Sony etc.

When it comes to laptops with embedded WiMAX, all the big names such as Acer, Dell, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, Asus, Panasonic, MSI, etc are there.

CIOL: How about WiMAX Forum's proposed certification lab in India?

CSR: Opening a certification lab in association with DoT has been our keen interest. However, whether the lab would be launched or not, it will not affect the penetration of WiMAX.

Having said that, if you have a lab, it will help in interpretability testings based on Indian standards. However, certification is required when there are manufacturers, who design and produce devices in India. Although today there are more than 450 WiMAX device manufactures, they are mostly based in Taiwan or other parts of the world. Whereas, in contrast, there are only very few such manufacturers in India.