New Delhi: Each year often brings technology-driven changes—most incremental and some big leaps. In 2008, there will be easier ways to pay bills, better avenues for comparison-shopping, and more efficient methods of hiring. And, this (Chinese) Year of the Rat will have more than its average share of big changes on the technology front for the average urban Indian. Expect changes in the fuel that powers your car or bike; the way entertainment—and work—happens while on the move or in so-called dead time, as in waiting for traffic gridlock to clear or a plane to take off. And, even how your office and, perhaps, home is lit.
Let’s start with mobile phone networks that service 220 million customers (statistically, that is equivalent to one in every Indian home, though that’s not quite the ground reality). Despite the acrimonious pull-and-push by various business and government lobbies, we will most likely see the ushering in of what is called 3G, or third generation, mobile-phone services in India as also, in small pockets, so-called fourth generation phone services where voice communications can be offered for free.
Such services will mean that phone companies will have to hard sell these offerings to improve their average billing among customers notorious for wanting everything on the cheap. Bharti Airtel Ltd and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) are clear that’s the path to improved profitability. Meanwhile, while 3G and Wimax technologies will let users download data, including music and video files as well as live television on their phones, another offering by telecom providers—Internet protocol television, referred to as IPTV, will allow subscribers to watch their favourite TV programmes as and when they want to.
BSNL, India’s biggest phone firm by revenues, plans to launch Wimax-based services in at least 1,000 villages and two large Indian states, including Punjab, by the first half of 2008. Wimax will offer broadband, high speed Internet access to mobile users in urban areas, predicts one company executive, adding that it would also be used to provide connectivity in community service centres in villages. “Wimax allows five times faster data download than 3G technology,” he insists.
The spread of Wimax offerings, yet, will “become a mainstream technology only after operators are able to make money out of 3G services, which looks more immediate,” says Deepak Kumar of tech research firm IDC’s India unit. He expects the launch of 3G services by late 2008.
With the Union government planning to auction radio spectrum for 3G services, operators are readying their roll-out plans. In phases, the millions of mobile phone subscribers in the country will have a choice to access and download music and video files by paying an extra fee to their telecom operators.