“The wireless broadband market is poised to take off”

Hakan Eriksson CTO Ericsson	Jan Campbell Managing Director Ericsson India

Is the wireless broadband market poised to grow in India? What kind of applications can be run on wireless broadband?

Hakan Eriksson: The wireless broadband market is poised to take off in a big way in India. Though both wireline and wireless broadband will grow rapidly, the latter will grow faster vis-à-vis wireline. The biggest difference between the two is that a wireless broadband network can be deployed faster and is less expensive to maintain. Additionally, the time required and the cost of laying a wireline network is higher than that incurred while setting up a wireless network. We can set up a wireless network for a given area in six months, but setting up a wireline network for the same area will take more than a year. With the arrival of high data speeds on wireless broadband, we expect it to be adopted across urban and rural India. A 3G base station can be up and running in a short timeframe, providing high-speed data transfer (100 Mbps). Applications such as video conferencing, remote classroom training and faster downloads of entertainment videos, movies and music— which are likely to be used by training institutions, in e-governance and for healthcare—will be facilitated by wireless broadband.

Jan Campbell: The potential of wireline broadband is also huge and Ericsson India has some big contracts with MTNL (Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited) Delhi and Mumbai in this space.

Can you pinpoint some trends in mobile broadband technology?

Eriksson: In recent times there has been an evolution of High Speed Downlink Packet Access, and 3G technology has come on the GSM track. We expect faster market growth in GSM than CDMA. For instance, we have seen 16 new countries adopting GSM in recent times. We anticipate the evolution of the EDGE (Enhanced Data for Global Evolution) technology in the mobile broadband space, as EDGE will offer a high beat rate in a local area with speeds of 100 kbps. Currently, there is limited availability of handsets supporting EDGE technology. EDGE as a technology is inexpensive, but the shortage of handsets supporting EDGE is hampering growth. Once the production of EDGE handsets ramps up, we expect prices of these handsets to drop.

Ericsson is also providing managed services to many telecom service providers in India. How is this shaping up?

Campbell: We feel that Indian telecom service providers are coming forward to outsource their network management requirements to us. Because interest levels are rising, we look forward to this market growing steadily. We are managing Bharti Telecom’s network across 15 Indian states. Our aim is to enable customers to focus on their businesses instead of running their networks. We have a network operations centre that manages our Indian customers’ networks centrally.

What will be your future strategy in India?

Campbell: We expect India to have 100 million mobile subscribers by 2006, and surpass 200 million by 2008-2009. We have about 1,500 people in India at present. We have taken the initiative to set up a manufacturing plant in Kukas, Rajasthan, that will be involved in manufacturing base stations for cellular networks in India. The plant will help us reduce operational expenses as well as the operator’s capital expenditure, and allow just-in-time delivery for capacity and coverage from our own supply centres in India. We have also set up an Ericsson Mobility World Centre in Gurgaon. This facility allows us to partner mobile Internet application and solution developers, as well as network operators who are developing new applications.

—Abhinav Singh