India will launch cheap broadband
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India's government announces that the two state-run telephone companies will launch a cheap high-speed internet service by mid January.
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Without any sort of fanfare, AT&amp;T Inc. has started offering a broadband Internet service for $10 a month, half the price of its cheapest advertised plan.
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(InfoWorld) - The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) has qualified 12 bidders for the government's Next Generation National Broadband Project. The announcement comes follows IDA's December 2006 call for interested companies and consortiums to demonstrate their capabilities for approval to bid on the project. In all, around 30 companies planning to bid either as individual entities or part of a consortium were qualified for the project. To qualify, companies had to show they have the financial resources and the experience necessary to build the network. Singapore has been moving towards the construction of the next-generation broadband network since February last year, when the country's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, announced plans to build a high-speed network. The network, which will offer speeds ranging from 100M bps (bits per second) to more than 1G bps and will connect all homes, schools and businesses in Singapore to the network. The next-generation network is expected to be ready by 2012. While Singapore is among Asia's wealthiest and most developed nations, the country's adoption of broadband and wireless networking technologies lags behind that of Asia's most connected countries, such as South Korea. The next-generation broadband project, and the rollout of a public Wi-Fi network, have been proposed by the government as ways to help close this gap. The next step of the next-generation broadband project involves discussions between the government and the pre-qualified bidders on the exact specifications and requirements of the project, which will be set forth in a formal tender document, expected to be released later this year. Companies that were not pre-qualified for the project are not excluded from bidding, IDA said. They can either join an approved consortium or seek approval from IDA to bid on their own. Â
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(InfoWorld) - New research has confirmed that India's mobile phone market is set for a period of fast growth, with revenue from cellular services expected to jump by more than 18 percent each year for the next five years. Most of the growth will come from rural areas, where only 2 percent of the population have access to mobile phones today, said Madhusudan Gupta, senior research analyst at Gartner, which conducted the research. Service providers have already started to focus on rural markets, with aggressive rates and handsets priced at under $25, he said. Cellular service revenue in India will increase at a compound annual rate of 18.4 percent between this year and 2011, to reach $25.6 billion, Gartner estimated. Cellular revenue last year was $8.9 billion. As call rates fall from their current level of 2.6 cents per minute to rates comparable to fixed lines, which are about 0.9 cents per minute, a broad swathe of additional users will start using mobile phones, Gupta said. "The fixed-line infrastructure in India is not that good, which is giving enough of space for mobile wireless to move in," he said. Revenue from data will outpace that of voice services and contribute to about one fifth of revenue in 2011, more than double its share last year, although most of that growth will come from urban markets, Gartner said. As they expand into rural areas, operators will see their average revenue per user (ARPU) fall to $59.50 per year by 2011, from $82.1 last year. Successful operators will be those that make up for the falling ARPU through economies of scale, Gupta said. Operators are likely to collaborate by sharing infrastructure and outsourcing their network management to equipment vendors, and possibly system integrators, he added. For example, Bharti Airtel, a large Indian service provider, said Wednesday it had awarded a contract worth $2 billion over two-years to Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, to expand its network in rural areas and provide capacity management. The service providers should not be short of funds for expansion.Â Vodafone Group's acquisitionÂ in May of a controlling interest in the Indian operator Hutchison Essar, for $10.9 billion, has increased the valuation of all Indian service providers, and is helping them to attract private equity and other investments, Gupta said. The rural demand will come from businesses expanding into these areas, as well as from local businesses. Some individuals will own mobile phones, although the predominant model is likely to be a communally-owned handset, a concept already tried in some areas, Gupta said. India added 15.5 million mobile subscribers in the first quarter of this year, taking the total to 165.1 million, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. Gartner expects 58 percent of the rural population and 95 percent of the urban population to be covered by mobile networks by 2011. That year, the total number of mobile connections in India will have increased to more than 462 million, according to Gartner. India's total population at that time will be close to 1.2 billion, according to some estimates.
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U.S. chip maker Advanced Micro Devices  AMD.N has unveiled a low-cost Internet access device that  could cost just a few hundred dollars, aimed at first-time  technology users in the developing world.
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US chip maker Advanced Micro Devices AMD.N has unveiled a low-cost Internet access device that could cost just a few hundred dollars, aimed at first-time technology users in the developing world.
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(InfoWorld) - Ethiopia, South Africa, Ghana, and Mauritius will be the initial countries for the Indian government's $1 billion Pan Africa E-network project, a joint initiative with the Africa Union (AU). The project aims to develop Africa's information and communication technologies by eventually connecting all of the 53 African countries to a satellite and fiber-optic network. To launch first in Ethiopia, the project is seen by some as Africa's biggest ICT project ever, with online education and telemedicine programs expected to extend ICT infrastructure to rural areas and other underserved communities. India hopes the investment will help it to sell more telecoms gear to Africa, including VSATs (very small aperture terminals), as well as IT services for telemedicine and other social applications. It has said it wants to make inroads into Africa's ICT markets before China steps up its investments there. The telemedicine network will be used to share knowledge from Indian doctors with their African counterparts through online training programs, River Wallang, the Indian High commissioner to Zambia, said in an interview last month in Lusaka. The education network will allow similar information sharing, he said. Africa faces several challenges to building out its ITC infrastructure, including nonexistent or low capacity national and international communications backbones, Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa said recently. âAfrica needs nothing less than the development of broadband infrastructure if the continent is to move together with the rest of the world,â he said, at an event to launch the cellZ network (mobile phone service provider) in Zambia's western province last month. The Africa Development Bank has also announced plans to invest $1 billion in the continent's telecommunication and energy infrastructures. The E-network project was first announced by Indian president Abdul Kalam in South Africa in 2004. In October 2005, the Indian government and the Africa Union signed a memorandum of understanding to formalize the project. The AU, in Addis Ababa, is an organization chartered to accelerate economic development and peace in Africa. The Indian government has already established tele-education and telemedicine hubs in Bangalore and Ahmedabad. It will establish a hub in Africa to act as the main contact point between Africa and India and oversee the delivery of services. ICT has been identified as the main growth area in India-Africa trade relations, Erastus Mwencha, secretary general for The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), said recently.
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India's two state-run telephone companies will start high-speed Internet services from Jan. 15 at about a sixth of the prevailing prices, a government statement said on Friday.
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Chip company Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Thursday rolled out a low-cost Internet device aimed at underserved markets around the world.
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U.S. chip maker Advanced Micro Devices  has unveiled a low-cost Internet access device that could cost just a few hundred dollars, aimed at first-time technology users in the developing world.
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Bandwidth providers said they expected India's Internet service to be back to about 80 percent of its usual speed by the end of Friday
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Expect mobile broadband access to be commonplace in the next couple of years. The technologies are here and so is the demand, but spectrum and cost issues remain.
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Group including Amazon, Google, and TiVO lobbies for a national broadband policy that would provide affordable access for all.
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U.S. chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has introduced a low-cost Internet access device that could cost just a few hundred dollars, aimed at first-time technology users in the developing world.
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The MIT thesis-turned-company wants to build Wi-Fi networks in India. It's starting in San Francisco.
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British mobile phone giant Vodafone said it planned to launch a high-speed broadband Internet service for its millions of customers in Britain.
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The Indian government has offered hi-tech cooperation to the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Comtel project, a proposed private regional telecommunications company.