First some details on the current situation in India:
Yet from a wired broadband internet position:
Latest news and information on 3G, 4G, 5G wireless and technologies in general.
The Indian Department of Telecoms (DoT) has published its official timetable for the award of its 3G licences across the country as well as a breakdown of how the relevant spectrum will be allocated across the telecoms circles.
As expected, the state-owned operators BSNL and MTNL each have been reserved one block of 2x5MHz in each circle, with the exception of Rajasthan (State in North West India) which will have no 3G spectrum at all. The number of blocks of spectrum in the private auction differs depending on the circle (see the spectrum table, below).
The auction for the 15-year licences is planned for Jan. 15, 2009. In the majority of 3G service areas there is 25 MHz of paired frequency bandwidth available which relates to four blocks of 2x5 MHz spectrum available for auction in addition to the block reserved for the state-owned operators, Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam (MTNL). Spectrum is rather limited in many other areas, including the major metro circle of
All of the 3G spectrum will be in the 2.1 GHz band and in the 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz frequency bands, a separate auction for Broadband Wireless Access (WiMAX). In both these auctions, which will take place two days after the 3G auction, bidders are restricted to just one block of spectrum per service area.
The table below shows the proposed spectrum layout.
Service Area ( | Paired frequency bandwidth to be allotted | Paired frequency bandwidth to be allotted |
| 160 | 15 |
Mumbai | 160 | 25 |
Kolkata | 80 | 25 |
| 160 | 25 |
Gujrat | 160 | 15 |
Andhra Pradesh | 160 | 25 |
Karnataka | 160 | 25 |
Tamil Nadu | 80 | 25 |
Kerela | 80 | 25 |
| 80 | 25 |
Haryana | 80 | 25 |
Uttar Pradesh(e) | 80 | 25 |
Uttar Pradesh (w) | 80 | 10 |
Rajasthan | 0 | 20 |
Madhya Pradesh | 80 | 25 |
| 80 | 25 |
Himachal Prades | 30 | 25 |
| 30 | 25 |
Orrisa | 30 | 25 |
| 30 | 25 |
North East | 30 | 5 |
| 30 | 25 |
Yes you read it correctly, A Little World (ALW), a Mumbai-based company, which has come up with a unique idea: turning a regular mobile phone to play the role of a bank’s branch.
Faced with the challenge of creating affordable solutions to enable penetration of banking in rural areas, ALW came up with this solution. The equipment costs not more than Rs 30,000 (pounds 400 or $700) through which a bank’s branch becomes functional and offers facilities like depositing/withdrawing money, electronic money transfer, crediting of pension money and also having an online passbook.
Other peripherals that make up the branch are a printer-cum-fingerprint scanning machine, cash box to store upto Rs one lakh in cash and a high resolution camera. The mobile phone can store data of upto 50,000 customers including the entire identification profile comprising a picture and six fingerprint templates among other details.
A big opportunity was unlocked after RBI announced a new policy initiative to allow banks to do business using the ‘business correspondent’ model. Under this, a bank ties up with third parties like ALW’s clients Zero Mass to conduct business in far-off areas on behalf of the banks. All the mobile phones have latest security features and are connected to ALW (the technology and backend partner for Zero mass) servers using GPRS or EDGE technology. The ALW server is in turn connected to the core-banking server of the client bank due to which a transaction is made possible just like it happens in a conventional way.
The critical necessity to opening a branch though is the availability of mobile coverage at the villages and ALW has tie ups with all the major GSM mobile phone operators in the country. Zero Mass currently has tie ups with 24 banks to operate their banking operations in remote and unserviced areas across 18 Indian states.
Christened as ‘Zero Platform’ for branchless banking based on mobile, a branch is typically set up in the village grocery store or panchayat office. Peripherals like the printer and camera are connected to the mobile phone using Bluetooth technology and the entire system has been designed so that it can function even during power cuts, which the villages often experience. “The selected handset (either Nokia or Motorola) has features for encryption and decryption of data through which we can make use of a public medium like GPRS to send data,” says ALW’s Chief Technology Officer Anurag Gupta.
In a short span of a year, ALW has set up over 2,800 branches for Zero Mass across the country and has plans to increase the total number of branches to 5,000 by December this year. The accounts are opened free for a period of 10 years and Zero Mass currently boasts of over 12 lakh accounts with around 20,000 added everyday. “The mobile phone operated branch is a great idea. I fail to understand why others in the same space like us have not made use of existing technologies to come up with feasible solutions like this which offer exponential growth opportunity due to low capital expenditure,” says Gupta.
Zero Mass’s motto is to increase electronic transactions like payments and crediting of accounts , Gupta says. Keeping this in view, customers are encouraged to use the account for electronic money transfer, insurance premium payments, depositing of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) wages and pension funds in the account. As a pilot project, mobile recharge payments are also being done through Zero Mass-operated branches.
ALW gets a certain amount as technical fees for rendering its services while Zero Mass gets a percentage as commission for each deposit and withdrawal transaction made at the branch. Gupta, also a director at Zero Mass, says the way forward for the company is to make use of the platform for more profitable transactions offering bigger commissions such as mobile phone recharges and railway ticket booking.
Now for the small print; only the ISP's will be permitted to compete with the telephone companies using this VoIP. The fixed line and the mobile operators are up in arms about this because the ISPs are going to get free money whereas the mobile operators had to pay license fees for entry into the market.
This may not be a big problem for the time being as at the moment India only has around 5 million broadband subscribers whereas there are 287 million mobile subscribers and around 40 million fixed line subscribers. Also, the call rates are so cheap that additional investment in a PC and broadband connection (which is comparatively expensive) may not be lucrative.
If the recommendations by TRAI are accepted, there will surely be a VoIP revolution in India. The existing fixed line and mobile operators will have to come up with some challenging billing models to survive in future.
Wireless Broadband opportunity in India bigger than:
Current deployments by Indian operators rival the biggest ofWiMAX deployments around the world. VSNL deploys the largest WiMAX network in a city across the world.
Soft launched on December 31, 2007 in BANGALORE:
Way forward:
Now lets compare this to how mobile operators behave.