Mega WiMAX Deployment Starts in India
29 January 2008Indian telecom operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd is embarking on one of the largest Mobile WiMAX deployments covering 400 cities and a population of 200 million people.
Of course, given the high poverty rate in India the addressable population is likely to be closer to 50 million or a little lesser.
BSNL, a state-owned telecom operator, is deploying Mobile WiMAX services in the four Indian states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa and Andhra Pradesh.
It will not include India’s commercial capital Mumbai but does include other cities like Hyderabad, a magnet for software companies like Microsoft and Satyam.
San Francisco-based Soma Networks is providing its FlexMAX Mobile WiMAX technology for the BSNL deployment.
Based on the 802.16e-2005 standard, FlexMAX is said to include base stations, mobile stations and a range of customer service network servers in a complete package that eliminates the need for multiple solution providers and integration projects.
FlexMAX uses a tower-mounted radio subsystem along with antenna technologies that dynamically adapt to any terrain or service area by boosting signal strength without increasing power consumption. A single FlexMAX macrocell base station is supposed to be able to serve up to 1000 subscribers within a cell radius of up to 16 km (10 mi)
Soma executives in the US said the equipment had been tested in urban, semi-urban and rural areas of India over the last 18 months.
Besides providing the equipment, Soma will also be involved in managing some aspects of the WiMAX service.
The first milestone in BSNL’s deployment in the first half of this year will see launch of the Mobile WiMAX service in some unspecified cities.
Soma declined to disclose the value of the BSNL contract.
But Indian news reports said that the project was based on a revenue sharing deal with Soma’s investment coming in the form of its technology.
BSNL’s WiMAX subscribers can look forward to a maximum download speed of up to 1.5 Mbps.
“India has an immense need for connectivity across a varied and wide-ranging demographic population,” said BSNL chairman and managing director Kuldeep Goyal. “After testing, we found Soma Networks’ solution qualified to meet the requirements of our Vision 2010 mandate.”
India’s Vision 2010 is targeting 20 million broadband subscribers by 2010.
India’s current broadband infrastructure is woefully inadequate. The country of 1.2 billion people had just 2.67 million broadband subscribers at the end of September 2007, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
“The opportunity for us is huge,” said Soma’s senior director for corporate marketing Frank Petkovich.
Founded by people of Indian origin in the US, Soma has raised $175 million in private equity financing since 1999.
Soma’s founder and CEO is Yatish Pathak and his father MS Pathak is the chairman. Yatish is a former Bell Labs alumni while the elder Pathak was once a senior government official in India. The family’s India connections must have helped in navigating through the thicket of India’s notorious bureaucracy.
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