Robindhra Mangtani, Director, GSMA shares the prospects of Mobile Broadband in India in an interaction with TelecomTiger.

Q1) From an operator’s perspective, how strong is the business case for mobile broadband in India?

Ans: There are two answers to this. It depends on how strong the social policy objectives are in terms of bridging the digital divide. We see a strong role for the government of India in terms of its objectives in bridging the digital divide, e-learning, education and e-governance and so on and broadband rides on the back of that. We believe that broadband is a utility and certainly the case is demonstrated in every other country of the world. People cannot manage without it once they get it. The need for broadband maybe to access passport status, carry day-to-day transactions, education, telemedicine and so on.

The second part is that there is a latent demand for broadband in India. Truly the fixed line infrastructure can never deliver broadband in India. We have had some consultancy reports to tell us that maximum fixed number infrastructure can deliver is nine million broadband connections. Whereas the potential we believe in India by 2014 as witnessed by consultant reports was 100 million subscribers. And the reason why we say that and believe its correct is because we have evidences from other countries which bear all. Sri Lanka for instance, although a much smaller country has 160, 000 subscribers to 3G broadband in two years. And Australia, which is a very large rural area, has 7 million connections in two years.  So, there is a huge potential. Mobile broadband has just started.

Q2) Apart from conventional data services, what are the kinds of applications possible over mobile broadband environment?

Ans: Well I think it all is limited by your imagination. I have been talking a lot about software as service. Mobile network today offers software as a service (SaaS). The applications that you get on your handset are living in the network somewhere and are delivered on to the mobile network infrastructure.

So any application that’s available on the web today can be mobile-enabled. If you use gmail, hotmail today there is a software applications, there are certain applications for the mobile broadband crowd as well. Globally, iPhone alone has witnessed one billion downloads from App Store in less than 18 months.

India is a huge IT industry and obviously one of the leaders in outsource billing, operations and portals for companies worldwide. The government can provide mobile broadband right down to the village panchayat level and to the council level and deliver applications over the network.

Q3) Do you feel the current guidelines and the kind of spectrum available in India make a strong case for mobile broadband in India. Do you feel there is more scope for government support on the initiative?

Ans: We are waiting for the government of India to auction regions. We are just hungry for that. We see there is demand and we conceive that government’s objectives to bridge the digital divide require broadband.

We believe that starting the process in terms of the 3G auction is critical and then expansion plans straight after is also a key.

And the reason to say that is 3G provides a massive expansion based on voice and its capabilities, which takes the pressure off the existing 2G network, which is already suffering a capacity crunch in its voice service. So the first phase if you like is taking off the weight from 2G network and moving on to 3G network. And the second phase if I may say is that we have got this extra capacity. Till then it’s good to make sure you are capturing that demand and making sure you give them this experience.

We don’t see evidence yet that the government is thinking along those lines but see that the government wants to do is 3G auction and that’s the time immediately for doing that.

Q4) When it comes to rural subscribers, the uptake of services like mobile broadband is marred by the fact that the price of terminals to access such services do not fit pocket. How should one overcome such challenge?

Ans: With regards to individual person, it’s a tough thing to say because we don’t really know what the prices are really going to be. Lets be honest, there is no service out there today available in the community. I don’t yet know what the prices are going to be. I have a fair idea that the ARPU rate in India is low as compared to other countries. So the idea that rural villagers can spend much more on broadband may not be the case. We have a fair idea about what h