In the past years India has made striking progress in areas of technology, telecommunication, infrastructure and other hi-tech areas. On of the biggest advantage India had was we could directly adapt the most latest technology as there was really no legacy and most of the government officials had absolutely no idea of the technology. All they were aware was some companies are planning to launch a new service and were probably interested in how many money they will make :-)

As a consumer of mobile services India at that time got the state of the art GSM and CDMA 2000 networks. But since then all the development in the telecom business and the billions of dollars in revenues got the government involved and they did what they are best at...

STALL.... TRAI (Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India) along with the ministry of telecom has been sitting on 3G licensing for many years... and the entire 3G spectrum license process and the politics around that is well known.

The squabble between TRAI and DoT (Department of Telecom) made this thing into a joke. While TRAI wants DoT to consult it in 3G license auctions; Now, DoT is all set for a head on collision with TRAI over 3G license global auctions to be carried out soon.

I was surprised to see that the Prime Minister of India along with Telecom Minister was actually involved in the ’soft’ launch of India’s first 3G service calling it the latest and the best was nothing short of a joke...

3G is now considered as an old service and many of the leading 3G players are upgrading to the next genertion 4G technologies with technologies like 3GPP LTE and Flash-OFDM. In February 2007 NTT DoCoMo announced the completion of a 4G trial where they achieved a maximum packet transmission rate of approximately 5Gbps in the downlink using 100MHz frequency bandwidth to a mobile station moving at 10km/h. And China too trialed its version of LTE during the Olympics and commercial launch is comming soon.

Also what is shocking me more is the response of the traditional media who are reporting this incident as the next big thing in telecoms technology and how its going to change the world of Value Added Services in India. Also the poor knowledge most of the so called telecoms journalist have on the entire 3G space.. If they had some basic understanding the press should have been demanding scraping of 3G licensing altogether.

I was not surprised to see all the major telecom companies in India calling it a landmark and how their own 3G launches will change the world....while I think its more to do with the hype which will bump up their stock price.

Reality is India should have junked 3G and gone directly for implementation of 4G... by the time all the operators do launch 3G in India it will be middle of 2010. For now it looks like 4G will surely come to India..when the world will be in 10G ;-)379165