Gartner announced that its report on WiMax forecast for India reflected that the country will have around 6.9 million WiMax subscribers by 2011.

Gartner said in its report that although the Indian government is strongly promoting WiMax as a technology to connect the country with broadband services, the country-specific mobile broadband framework makes a nationwide rollout of WiMax cost prohibitive.

The Gartner report comes down heavily on the government as it cites that although the technology is presented as an important driver for broadband policy in India, the Indian government has failed to effectively motivate operators to roll out countrywide mobile broadband.

“By January 2008, India had only 3.4 mn broadband subscribers, far short of the target of 9 mn by 2007 set by the broadband policy. Given the low levels of PC penetration in India, there will be a limited demand for WiMax and the country-specific mobile broadband framework makes a nationwide rollout of WiMAX cost prohibitive. Hence, in the near term, WiMax is still a niche technology and limited to enterprise and high-end residential users in urban India,” Gartner principal research analyst Naresh Singh said.

Gartner also stated that since spectrum availability remains unclear now, the initial uptake of WiMax services will be for nomadic or fixed wireless applications.