Week Summary

Currently India is in the phase of 3G spectrum allocation. This week we will see 3G standards that might be deployed in India. Who will play major force in deploying those standards and standards are targetted to whom ?

3G or Not !

Before going to look into standards let us see what Telecom Authority of India and researchers have to say about 3G deployment

• If 3G is indeed opened up, India will finally join the club of countries -- including all of Europe, South Africa, most of Asia, Australia, New Zealand, some of U.S. services
• Following the failure of the first round of 3G due to exorbitant bidding for 3G spectrum by telecom companies in Europe, there has been intense speculation over the last 18 months on whether India should open up the 3G spectrum at all, and if it did, whether it should be priced or not
• I plan to leapfrog from the current generation of mobile telephony to the next 4G. Currently, India uses the technology of GSM (2.5 G) and CDMA for mobile telephony. The 3G standard has been evolved, but has not proved cost-effective. I therefore plan to leapfrog this generation and develop 4G technology
• However the pro-3G camp, which includes the Cellular Operators Association of India, says that if the government decides on a low or no license entry fee, 3G would work successfully

According to comments above, I can see there is lot of debate about to launch 3G at all or not in India.

Various 3 G standards

In this post we will focus on various 3G standards and which standard is suitable for Indian Telecom industry

• IMT-2000, in fact, represents several incompatible standards lumped together under one banner. The hope of IMT-2000 is that phones using these different standards will be able to move seamlessly between all networks, thus providing global roaming.

• UMTS is the successor to the current ultra-successful GSM mobile phone standard in Europe. UMTS is being very heavily sold as the 3G standard

• CDMA2000, is the 3G standard developed in the U.S. by Qualcomm and is the global competitor to UMTS

• TD-SCDMA, is a 3G standard largely developed in China

India has the potential to become a test bed for developing technologies. A recent report issued by the the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) says, India is expected to have 21.3m 3G users by 2010.

Standards Target

Senior officials from the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) and the GSM India, Department of Telecommunications, others from the regulation, vendor and content communities attended GSM > 3G India 2006 conference.

The day came to a close looking not at the low cost segment, but instead at India’s wireless 3G future as licenses are expected some time in the first half of 2006. Bharti Telesoft, Siemens and Ericsson delivered their vision of 3G in India covering network expansion, evolution and architecture as well as the potential for VAS using higher data rates. Naresh Gupta, Hutchison Essar and Chair, GSM India suggested that the 3GSM open standards provide a sustainable roadmap for Indian operator, allowing for backward compatibility and economies of scale.

From above it is clear that, standards for deploying 3G services are targetted towards Indian service providers and 3GSM open standards is key solution.