Telecoms in India | Full-spectrum dominance | Economist.com
The operators added more than 8m mobile-phone subscribers in October, bringing the total to over 217m. India has met its ambitious target, set two years ago, of 250m fixed and mobile-phone connections. But the government is sadly unprepared. It has not given India’s mobile operators enough space on the radio spectrum to carry calls crisply and reliably. India, the operators complain, faces a “spectrum crunch”.
In November Sunil Mittal, the chairman of Bharti Airtel, wrote to India’s telecoms secretary describing the “extreme anguish” caused by the “pitiful” amounts of spectrum granted to operators using GSM technology, the dominant standard that is used by three-quarters of Indian subscribers. The government had said it would provide extra spectrum to firms once…
Qualcomm has come under some pressure recently when Reliance, with one of the fastest growing CDMA-based networks in the world based on Qualcomm’s patented technology, announced that it would provide mobile service using GSM technology and criticised Qualcomm’s high royalty and licensing fees. The inference was that Qualcomm’s fees were resulting in higher costs for handsets which is preventing Reliance from offering affordable service to low-income subscribers.
Qualcomm claims that CDMA handset prices in India were already some of the lowest in the world and that royalty was only about $2 per handset. It further argues that Reliance’s move into GSM has to do with flawed spectrum policy of the Indian Telecom Ministry (DoT) that provides more than twice the spectrum to GSM operators compared to…
Tags: CDMA, CDMA technology, GSM, GSM technology, India, Indian Telecom Ministry, mobile service using GSM technology, Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm, Reliance, Tata, USD.
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