Today I read in news about Govt’s decision to finally end inter-circle roaming agreements between Airtel, Vodafone & IDEA.
Well, the case is not new. It has been up with doT from over months and got highlights when CEO’s of all 3 firms wrote letter to Prime Minister of India for his intervention. 

Little background

In 3G auction held in 2010, none of the operators got pan India spectrum across 22 telecom circles. Most of them have license in around 10 circles (few in 9, few in 11 and so on) and thus no one can provide full Nationwide 3G coverage.

Why did that happened?

Well, it was already expected well before auctions as Govt. gave only 20Mhz of spectrum in 2100 band in most of circles. It was decided that each player will get just 5Mhz, which brings number of 3G operators per circle to just 4. In all circles one slot was reserved for BSNL & MTNL (infact they were allocated spectrum back in 2008) and hence in most of circles there was scope of just 3 more operators. This was a problem as we do have more then 3 mobile operators at pan India level and which are big and doing pretty good business. Airtel, Tata Teleservices, Reliance, Vodafone, IDEA, Aircel, and few other small operators. Hence it resulted in cases like Airtel getting spectrum in Delhi, while IDEA missing in Delhi and going in for Haryana, where we find Airtel missing. (Here’s detailed circle wise allocation)

Few months back , Airtel, Vodafone and IDEA eventually got in an agreement for inter-circle roaming. It was a situation where a user say of Airtel Haryana (where Airtel has no 3G spectrum) will use IDEA’s 3G network and will have seamless experience and no roaming or any extra cost. 

Inter-circle roaming agreement: loss to Govt?

One of big controversies here is claim from Govt. that Inter-Circle roaming agreement was huge loss to Govt as operators who have not paid for a specific circle are offering service in that circle. Thus Airtel giving 3G in Haryana is like Rs 300 crore ($60million) loss to Govt. and same applied on IDEA giving 3G in Delhi – loss of $600million to Govt.

Is that true? Well, I am not a lawyer, nor I have read 3G agreement carefully from legal eyes to find if such sharing is permitted or not but from common technical sense I can say that’s just a bad judgement from Govt’s end.

Why bad judgement…

• Less spectrum was auctioned initially (that too after years of delay) and operators had no choice but to go for just few circles. (mistake from Govt. end)
• Broadband still suffers badly in India due to very poor policies of Govt. ranging from very poor management of BSNL to poor niXi tariff policies. We stand no where in top 50 list in terms of broadband speed and penetration. Checkout NSN’s Connectivity Score Card on India.
• Since operators had limited spectrum, capacity is always limited.  Thus if Airtel is sharing 5Mhz with IDEA, it is still 5Mhz in total. Hence Airtel is probably not making an undue gain from the deal. Airtel has not paid to Govt. for Haryana circle but in a sense paying to IDEA for the same. They are not getting things for free!
• All operators all already feeling hard on cash and another auction doesn’t makes sense + they are still investing a lot in building new network which is used by just a few users. Such sharing would have boosted up  usage significantly.

Well, based on above points, I don’t see any sense in not permitting such agreement. If it was illegal, then may be a policy should have been re-considered rather then causing another road block for broadband in India. What else Govt. of India expects from telecom players after getting $15billion in 3G auction that too just for 5Mhz block.

It is again one of decisions where I see Govt. to be less responsive towards pain of poor broadband in India and more concerned about making money from telcos which in-turn is passed on to end users of India.

With hope that India will have better broadband soon, Good Night!

Some people even feel like….

Let’s try to understand from basic definition about 4G.

As per ITU – 4G refers to wireless technologies which gives as fast as 1Gbps speeds when one is stationary, while 100Mbps speeds when one is on move. That’s it. Full stop.

1Gbps!!! Really?

Well, that’s “just in defination”. In real – there is no technology which is real 4G.

So what is WiMax?

Well WiMax is yet another technology which enables wireless broadband. WiMax comes in two flavors – fixed wimax (802.16d) and mobile wimax (802.16e). Fixed WiMax is available from long time. As per its name – “it’s fixed!”. It needs a clear “line of sight”. It works quite good as “alternate to DSL” in Rural areas where demand is very low. It’s also more suited for Rural environment because of easy line of sight clearance, apart from very long distance links (as long as 40Km’s). What WiMax we hear these days (the one which is operated by ClearWire in US, for carriers like Sprint, and BSNL wimax in India) that’s “mobile wimax”. It’s a totally different technology then fixed wimax, and both share “almost” nothing other then “name” wimax. It’s one of technologies heavily backed by Intel – who considered it as an alternate to Wifi covering whole city with just a couple of hotspots. Intel’s dream was much like having WiMax in way we see WiFi, though it seems it failed. Have a look at this promo video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQdc5AdJqCg

So how much speeds WiMax supports? Is that 1Gbps?!!

Mmm…NO! (not even in theory).

Current version of mobile wimax supports peak (read it theoritical) speeds of somewhere around 70Mbps. (no way close to 1Gbps)

What about LTE?

Well that’s one of other popular wireless technology. One must note that LTE is an upgrade from GSM > GPRS/EDGE > HSDPA > HSPA+ > LTE…

meaning it is not directly related to (wireless) broadband, but it’s an evolution from cell phone technologies. That’s one of prime reasons of why people call these as 4G technology. Present LTE standard too does not support 1Gbps of speeds, and so it’s also NOT the real 4G.

So what’s the real 4G?

Well till now – there is no commercially available technology which can support “real 4G” speeds. Recently NTT DoCoMo did tests for Advanced LTE, and it seems that might come as real 4G. In case WiMax, an advanced version 802.16m might be real 4G, but that has years to come!

But till now all operators are just calling their own technology as 4G.

In US , firstly Sprint came with mobile wimax based network (running over ClearWire’s network). It gives average downlink speeds of somewhere around 4-5Mbps, which is far away from 4G standard. Next, At&t and T-mobile upgraded their 3G network to HSPA+ which supports peak speeds of 21Mbps and they call it “almost 4G network”. Next, Verizon came up with their “4G LTE network” which supports real world speeds of somewhere between 5-12Mbps. One remarkable thing here was – Verizon is atleast giving real world speeds in their claim. Wireless broadband ads are all full of “peak” theoretical speeds while at the end users just get hardly 1/5th of that (on a lucky day).

A few interesting facts:

1. If At&t and T-mobile keep on calling their network as 4G, all Indian telecos can call their new network too as 4G as they are also deploying HSPA+ (right from start).
2. In rough and more real sense HSPA+ is considered to be 3.5G. They give end user a speed from 3-5Mbps which is definitely good for mobile broadband.
3. In real mobile WiMax & LTE (current standard) is 3.9G – a way to 4G. That’s why they call it as Long Term Evolution
4. Even if LTE advanced comes into picture, we still need really big slot of spectrum. These technologies are mostly about how efficiently we are using limited spectrum.
5. If DSL players start claiming “peak” speeds in their ads, then expect BSNL banner saying – “24Mbps for just 150Rs/month” and FTTH – Fiber to home deployments will go as high as “1.6Tbps of  peak speeds just for $60 a month”!
6. Even FTTH players like Verizon FiOS are yet not giving 1Gbps speeds. Issue remains with capacity and overall demand. (who really needs that much bandwidth today?)
7. LTE is in picture from many years but development was very slow till mid of 2010. Reason remains high cost of building new infrastructure, and not really any significant demand.
8. In India Reliance Infotel is expected to launch wireless broadband over TD-LTE in middle of this year. You should be excited about it – considering fact that Infotel is only player which holds pan India spectrum for BWA, apart from fact that it’s return of billionare Mukesh Ambani in communications industry.

So stop using word “4G” unless you can really download 1G of data in 8 seconds!

Fun fact: I am making this post after hearing from a friend that iPhone 4 is never going to launch in India since we don’t have 4G!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb5rNcMJHiM

At this – a few of tech news/blogs wondered if we really need wifi in the age of 3G, and upcoming BWA – mobile WiMax and LTE stuff.

Well, a simple and straight answer – Yes, we do need!

We need to remember that 2G, 3G, WiMax or LTE at the end have their own limitations. Firstly, we can’t say much of LTE as it’s very new (even yet under trail launch in US). Talking about 2G – it’s slow and just can’t provide broadband experience. While in case of 3G and mobile WiMax (802.16e) – spectrum remains as issue. If everyone on network start using the way in which services are advertised – networks will just choke up. And everything around us will look lot like….

That’s what happened in US on AT&T’s 3G network due to iPhone. No one really imagined that, but iPhone increased data use by over 5 times which badly hit 3G networks.

One must remember that except in case of mobile WiMax and LTE, all existing 3G technologies like HSDPA, HSPA+ etc most were designed to deliver “broadband experience” to mobile users. With term “mobile users” we primarily mean – cell phone users and laptop/netbook users at some extent – who are travelling and checking mails and doing other light tasks. They were NEVER made to replace existing fixed broadband technologies like DSL, Cable modems, etc.

Now, what’s happening in India is – due to super poor fixed broadband coverage users are tending towards mobile broadband services like Tata Photon, MTS, Reliance net-connect (EVDO based data cards) for their regular broadband needs. In “regular broadband” usage – one just doesn’t checks only email – users tend to download lot of data, tend to share heavy videos, tend to use cloud computing apps like Google docs, Zoho etc which at the end of day – choke mobile networks.

Here’s what we need in India:

1. Better mobile broadband technologies – extracting maximum out of available (limited) spectrum.
2. More and more offloading of heavy data users at Public places. Remember that users tend to use more data when they are sitting in a Public place like Airport, bus stand, Railway stations etc.All carriers should consider putting their wifi hot-spots in these public places. These hotspots can be restricted for carriers own network users.
3. Public wifi hotspots can be back-hauled using existing wired infrastructure of Public or Private telcos in metro cities, or fixed wimax in case of non-metro cities where LOS isn’t a big problem.
4. Better bundling options – We need better bundling of fixed and mobile broadband connections. Till now – there are not much options available, but I think ISP’s should start bundling datacard with fixed broadband (DSL) eventually having users to use fixed broadband for home/office while mobile broadband when they are out.
5. Capping seems bit crazy. I wish Aircel had capping of like 500MB for an hour of usage.

Well, nice work Aircel guys. It will surely help India with better broadband experience!

Recently TRAI i.e Telecom Regulatory Authority of India came with National Broadband Plan for India. I tried looking into it, and it’s just not making much sense at all.

The Plan…

TRAI’s plan is to put massive infrastructure – basically over 12 billion Km’s of Fiber Optic cable connecting whole India. Plan covers 63 large cities, 4315 small cities & around 3,75,552 villages which have a population of over 500. Intention is to have a heavy backbone across country, which will bring more competition in Indian broadband industry.

Do we really need it?

Simple answer – NO!

While making this recommendation, it seems like TRAI has almost forgotten that Govt. owns a State operator named BSNL which presently owns the biggest domestic backbone of India, with fibers connecting around 400, 000 of villages. In recommendation, they also mentioned that this building a new fiber network will help in having a scalable backbone, and aims to provide speeds of 10Mbps to users in cities while at least 2Mbps to users in villages. This again makes no sense at all!

In reality, the fact is – over 70-80% of existing fiber pairs of BSNL (call it Govt.) are yet not lit, and those dark fibres have a tremendous bandwidth. In fact if we add the total cables by all private players in India, it reaches hardly 1million route km of fiber cables, while BSNL itself owns over half of million route Km of fiber cables. With that, we can clearly say that we have enough bandwidth on domestic backbone of country. It is NOT in hold by private players, but is not in use to due super poor management work of BSNL, Political factors and lobbying by Private carriers. The latest part is decision by BSNL to auction off the capacity on those line!

One interesting point is in most of links, BSNL is hardly using 10-20% of capacity of fibre, still BSNL MPLS seems to be collapsing. Reason remains political and other non-technical stuff. Apart from that, this is just about the (domestic) backbone capacity. We need to see the other 3 parts also, which are real bottleneck.

Firstly, last mile in India remains an issue. Over 80% of copper is still in hands of BSNL, and quality is poor. The hosting problem in India continues with over ~80% sites not hosted in India. Which is causing super high usage of International bandwidth which is mostly responsible for super poor capping in broadband connections. The doT seems performing even more poor in peering policies.Govt. actually started with niXi i.e National Internet Exchange of India to promote domestic peering. It was a very good initiative, but seems like it didn’t worked due to poor tariff policy.

My recommendations to fix broadband problems with *existing* technologies:

1. Take BSNL seriously. DO NOT FORGET it’s govt. company and thus Govt. owns biggest telco infrastructure in country. All actions regarding build of infrastructure SHOULD be taken ONLY via BSNL.
   It makes no sense at all to bring more bodies/companies/departments into this. Seems funny? Seriously, that’s real!
   
2. Be serious for last mile connectivity. Put more pressure on BSNL to fix the last mile. Even a small budget can fix most of existing copper infrastructure which can be used for ~20Mbps broadband connectivity via DSL.
3. Based on Mr Sam Pitroda’s recommendation – unbundle the last mile copper pairs of country and make those available to private players who will help in removing the monopoly of State owned telco.
4. Stop jokes about spectrum and 3G. The 5Mhz spectrum given in last auction was more or less just a joke. Based on low ARPU’s private players are all looking into wireless connectivity. 3G can help in improving broadband penetration, while technologies like WiMax can really make BIG difference. Be serious, and give more spectrum to improve last mile link.
5. Fix the peering policies of niXi. Make sure charging is based on port speed rather the amount of data transfered. The per GB cost via niXi still seems very high.
6. Put a good amount of money on building big data centers in India. Probably 4 – North, South, East & West, and have offer very cheap web hosting services including collocation, shared hosting, dedicated servers, vps etc via BSNL. In fact BSNL does already offers that, but offering is all outdated, and they don’t have good data centers yet.
   Apart from that, Govt. should give high incentives to private companies coming in data center business to bring more and more content in India, which will drastically reduce costs. Remember, International bandwidth costs ~50times more then domestic bandwidth and fact remains that over 80% of sites an average Indian visits uses that expensive bandwidth!

Govt. should ask this question itself  – Is broadband a one of basic needs of Indian citizens, if yes, then put $$$ in fixing it in good way, if not then keep on making good $$$ from crazy auctions and poor policies.

With hope that next time you will be on better connection, thanks for your visit.