Nortel’s outlook on 3G in India

Posted on | December 6, 2005 |

Excerpts from an interview in CIOL with Malur Narayan, Director, Wireless Solutions, Nortel Networks.

Will the operators migrate to 3G service provision with their existing vendors?

3G is fundamentally a different technology. So the markets are wide open. For example, in the Europe, we were not with many operators of GSM. But a lot of them when they started 3G services bought Nortel solutions. The reason, one is going from GSM, fundamentally a TDM technology to WCDMA, which is a CDMA-based. The transition is not easy to make. It is a fairly big upgrade exercise unless one bought dual mode base stations. Majority of the sites installed in India are not dual mode and they will have to upgrade their sites one by one. It is as good as signing a new vendor. We use this technology discontinuity to position ourselves in 3G. We have been very successful in the Europe and North America and India will be no different.

Which 3G technology will prevail in India?

CDMA in India is between Reliance, Tatas, BSNL and MTNL. Even though their (CDMA) market share is very small, the growth of the subscribers has been very strong. They are adding about 700-800 thousand subscribers every month. It’s an incredible pace and it is really going to succeed in rural India as well. There is still a strong place for CDMA and that is not going to go away. And many of the operators are looking at EVDO etc. to provide broadband through CDMA. WCDMA, obviously, is also going to have a spot as many of the GSM operators are looking at migrating to this. The roll out for that will little bit slower than 3G CDMA roll out. As for WCDMA, a lot will depend on the spectrum. Also the cost of migrating from GSM to WDCMA will be generally more than that compared to migrating from CDMA 1x to EVDO.

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