The Hindu Business Line : `India likely to use hybrid network for broadband'

PAINLESS UPGRADATION: (From right) Mr Hamid Ahmadi, Chief Architect and Senior Vice-President, Motorola Inc, USA; Mr P. Subrahmanyam, Senior Vice-President, Wipro Technologies; and Dr G. Venkatesh, General Chair, Comsware 2007 and Executive Director and Group CTO/CSO, Sasken Communication Technologies, at a press conference in Bangalore on Tuesday.- G.R. N. Somashekar

Bangalore , Jan. 9

India is probably going to see a hybrid network for broadband in the future, according to top telecom leaders speaking on the future of communication technology at Comsware 2007.

The second international conference on Communications Software and Middleware (COMSWARE), organised by IEEE, is being held in the city.

"The geopositioning of cities here is interesting. The big cities will probably be connected by wireline infrastructure, while rural India could use WiMAX. For the sparsely populated regions, point-to-point wireless could be used," said Mr Hamid Ahmadi, Chief Architect, Motorola Inc.

"There is no wireline infrastructure in India, so the solution has to be wireless," said Mr G. Venkatesh, Executive Director and Group CTO, Sasken Communication Technologies. "The technical challenge will be providing reasonable quality of broadband experience on wireless over distances (several km), which is still a long way away," he added.

We have only scratched the surface and will see a boom in the usage of broadband Internet in the coming decade, agreed others.

"3G for the masses could bring about a revolution," said Mr Swami Krishnan, Chief Marketing Officer, Sasken Communication Technologies, adding, "There are over 400 million who have never said "hello" over the phone."

Broadband Internet will take another five years to penetrate to the villages. New applications such as IPTV would change broadband. "With newer applications, we might run out of bandwidth here," warned Mr Ahmadi. To combat this, we will need more fibre and more spectrum. "Reserving a highway in the sky for only one of the technologies is wrong. We need to free spectrum," said Mr Krishnan.

"The good news, however, is that India can leapfrog technologies. We can upgrade painlessly to that broadband technology that suits that area the best."