Wireless India: Empowering people

BANGALORE, INDIA: The most important benchmark of looking at the telephone and digital world is reach, feels Jhunjhunwala, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras and founder, Tenet Telecom.

Speaking at a plenary session about wireless India at the EmTech 2010 conference here today, he said that today telephony has reached to about 90 per cent of the population. The next step is taking on the remaining 10 per cent.

According to him, two major factors that will help in tapping the remaining market are affordability and the broadband. Indians have the culture of information transfer traditionally and English, as a great enabler of the information transformation, contributes to the growth of the Internet and mobile subscription.

“Given the present structure, the market and competition will take care of the prices, which will solve the issue of affordability. In the context of the broadband the government needs to speed up and look at 4G in the next one and a half years,” he said.

Jhunjhunwala talked about the major trend that would lead to the more demand and adaptability of the wireless in the country. Starting with voice Internet, he said that the voice technology can break the barriers across the uneducated and illiterate.

Second major areas are banking and financial transactions, use of mobiles for education, healthcare, agriculture, mobile ERPs in companies, surveys/opinion polls and sensing/monitoring and regulating.

Talking at the same session, Prof. S Sadagopan of International Institute of Information Technology, said, “In wireless space, mobile phone has witnessed a spectacular growth in India and we are adding 15 million plus mobiles subscribers every month of late.”

But the landline subscription growth rate is declining steadily, he pointed out. “The impressive growth is continuing as there are lots of wireless applications changing peoples lives,” added Prof. Sadagopan.