Welcome to WiMax, India! (Better late than never): Your Friendly Neighbour

More than a year after Pakistan announced the world’s largest WiMax network, India is following suit with a somewhat modest 200,000 user deployment. Tata group will be investing $500M over 3 years to build out a WiMax infrastructure primarily for commercial use. In Pakistan, the magnitude of WiMax adoption has been far more significant. Wateen and Mobilink, two of the largest private telecom companies in the country have built out massive networks designed for the use of the individual, SMBs and large corporate organizations. In order to support this infrastructure, three independent Fiber backbones have been laid throughout the country, PTCL’s, Wateen’s and Mobilink’s. Wateen’s WiMax network has been operating in Pakistan since the last several months.

Broadband penetration is fairly low in India, at about .2% (point 2 percent) of the population, but we hope this improves in the coming days. Many of Pakistan’s up and coming web content and services companies will find a market in India as relations between the two countries improve, and certainly, a greater number of broadband users in our neighbouring country will provide a larger market. Read on to see the original news story.

Tata Rolling Out Large WiMax Network in India
 
By JOHN RIBEIRO, IDG News Service\Bangalore Bureau, IDG
Published: March 4, 2008

Tata Communications plans to connect 200,000 retail customers using WiMax by March 2009, the company said Tuesday.

The company, which is targeting both retail and enterprise customers, said that it plans to roll out WiMax in 110 cities for its enterprise customers and 15 cities for retail customers this year.

The company expects to invest US$500 million in this venture over the next three years, a company spokesman said.

India is relatively under-served in broadband Internet services, particularly for consumers. The country, with a population of 1.1 billion, had 3.24 million broadband subscribers at the end of January this year, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.

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