Wimax conquers Indian sub-continent

IT SEEMS that the Indian subcontinent is proving a successful sales outlet for Wimax. Tata Communications has just hired California's Telsima to carry out one of the largest WiMax deployments.

Largest Wimax deployments using STC/MRC antenna technology (Wossat?), that is.

Anyway, Tata will be breaking out of its home base of providing Internet connectivity to Bangalore and hopes to be covering not just 15 major Indian cities for retail users but also 110 cities for business customers by Q1 2009.

The reason for picking Wimax is simple. "It costs 4.3 million rupees ($106,669) per kilometre to roll out optical fibre in Mumbai," Tata's Shankar Prasad claimed.

This kind of deployment follows classic WLL (wireless local loop) lines where the technology will act as a replacement for standard copper or optical fibre networks. It won't be used for wireless mobile broadband in the foreseeable future.

"It will probably take nine to 12 months for those devices to be developed," claimed Neeraj Sonkar, a veep for wireless engineering with Tata, referring to the mobile version of Wimax.

A similar plan to roll out Wimax across India's neighbour, Pakistan, is being pushed by Wateen Telecom, although Taiwan looks most likely to be first with a national Wimax network.

The Tata network will operate in the 3.3 GHz region and will require around 3,000 base station sectors. At present there are something like 600 such sectors in Bangalore currently serving retail customers. µ