Union Minister has got a set of very ambitious plans for his sector in the year 2007. At the CEO’s roundtable at India Telecom 2006 Maran unveiled `Vision 2010', a 10-point charter for the Indian telecom sector, that covers everything from network expansion; broadband coverage; infrastructure sharing; 3G mobile services; IPTV, Mobile TV and WiMAX; to R&D, international bandwidth, and competition.
Rechristening 2007 as the ‘Year of Broadband’ in India, Maran ambitiously stated that he expects the India to have 9 million broadband connections by the end of 2007. The current connections are just over 3 million. The minister proved that his plans are more concrete rather than juts enthusiasm and good intent, when he announced that state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) will offer broadband services with speed of up to 2 megabits a second to all its existing subscribers who were till now getting 256 kilobits per second (kbps) connection. BSNL customers have further reason to enjoy this Christmas season— subscribers will not be charged for migrating to the high-speed broadband access nor will they have to change their consumer premise equipment.
Though Maran has thrown an open challenge to private providers like Bharti Airtel, and Reliance Communications, asking them to either “match it or beat it” no one has as yet taken the bait. Meanwhile BSNL is moving full swing ahead, and has begun rolling out the wireless carrier products of Aperto Networks, a California-based builder of the WiMAX base stations and subscriber units. The WiMAX network is touted to enable BSNL to offer enterprise customers a wide range of value-added, high bandwidth data communications services, such as MPLS, VPN, leased line, and Internet access, as well as VoIP, telemedicine, e-education, e-governance, and e-commerce in remote areas.
According to Aperto’s announcement, deployment of PacketMAX base stations and subscriber units across six cities and four rural areas in India comes as a result of Aperto’s successful bid in response to a BSNL tender. The six initial cities getting the WiMAX equipment are Kolkata (in West Bengal), Bangalore (in Karnataka), Chennai (in Tamil Nadu), Ahmedabad (in Gujarat), Hyderabad (in Andhra Pradesh), and Pune (in Maharastra). The deployment, which will also cover four rural districts in the State of Haryana, is planned for completion in January.
He also hoped that all secondary and higher secondary schools, public health institutions and panchayats would have broadband connections by 2008.
The further aims charted out in the program include:
Have 250 million telephone connections by 2007 and by 2010 to have 500 million mobiles.
With regard to the geographical coverage, 85 per cent mobile coverage of the country by 2007, 90 per cent by 2010.
50 million rural connections by 2007 and 80 million by 2010.
IPTV is expected to reach 70 towns by 2007 and 600 towns by 2010, and mobile TV in top 20 cities and towns in 2007.
The minister expects fresh commitment of about USD 2 billion in next one year or so in telecom manufacturing in the country, which could go up to USD 20 billion. Target is to double production, and achieve six times the export growth by 2010. Definitely seems ambitious, how much of this promise will be delivered in the “Year of Broadband” remains to be seen.
