Infotel, a Mukesh Ambani group company, wins bid for Pan-India BWA license

Mukesh Ambani is back in telecom, and with a bang. Buying up Infotel Broadband, which bid the most in the broadband wireless access (BWA) spectrum auctions and secured 20 MHz of spectrum in every single one of India’s 22 telecom circle, RIL now controls more spectrum than any of the established telecom players, and will pay, per MHz of spectrum, one fifth of what 3G bidders have. 20 MHz at one go is what is needed for efficient network planning as well.

True, Infotel would be offering high-speed data services, and not specifically voice services. Does this mean that it would not offer voice?


In a technologically advanced communication network, all information is first broken up into a large number of discrete packets, which then are transmitted over the network according to protocols together called an internet protocol (IP) suite.

At the receiver’s end, these packets of information are put together in the right order, to reproduce the original information. In an all-IP network of the kind being planned by Infotel, it doesn’t matter what that information is.

It could be video, text, music or, of course, voice. Voice is a subset of the communication services that can be rendered by a high-speed data network.

It would be a waste of resources to restrict the data network to delivering just voice, but since voice packets would occupy very little space, in comparison with, say, a high definition video, voice can be transmitted at very little cost as well.

In other words, there is no technological constraint on the BWA spectrum being used to deliver the full range of 2G and 3G services, and then some.

This technology would not be cheap, at current volumes of customer premise equipment (CPE is jargon for what consumers use - phone, modem, etc to receive the data signals).

But volumes can go up dramatically, as Reliance demonstrated when it originally entered telecom in 2003 and brought the cost of owning and using a wireless phone crashing down. So the cost restriction is a function of scale. And scale is something that the Ambanis are good at.

Is there a regulatory restriction? There is, sort of. Regulation does not allow domestic calls from a phone to another phone using voice over IP. But calls can be made from a computer to another computer.

Since all 3G and more evolved phones are all miniature computers, whether this regulatory restriction would apply to them is open to question.


In any case, it would be an anti-consumer restriction meant only to protect the revenues of incumbent service providers. Its removal would help make calls cheaper further. The telecom regulator has already recommended that VOIP calls be allowed.

But this debate matters for the telecom service providers. For the consumers of telecom services, the possibility of cheap, high-speed data connectivity offers game-changing possibilities.

Entertainment has been a big play in high speed data services in developed markets. So it would be in India. But here, it is entirely likely that this data connectivity would be used for innovations to make good the paucity of a variety of services that are taken for granted in developed markets.

For example, in education, health services, inclusive banking, delivery of subsidy for food, fuel and fertiliser directly to the consumer. The unique identity project would be a huge gainer from ubiquitous BWA.

Once complemented with rural electricity, essential to light up an imaging device, BWA can greatly boost rural productivity -designs for handlooms, detailed, videographic instructions for growing orchids on a remote hillside, techniques for making special cheeses, all sorts of things would materialise, changing rural life forever.