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.