‘3G mobile services may be available by mid 2008’
Our
Bureau
Speaking at the 3G
Third generation services will
enable mobile users to access high speed data services such as movie on demand
and mobile TV on their handsets. However with operators showing more interest
in getting 2G spectrum first, 3G services has been on
the backburner.
The Department of Telecom is yet
to finalise the policy for 3G services even though
the telecom regulator had given its recommendations a year ago.
Mr Raja said that a key hurdle to
the roll out of 3G services is the availability of spectrum.
“An institutional mechanism has
been put in place for early vacation by the Defence.
We are hopeful that some spectrum for both 2G and 3G services will be vacated
by the end of this year and this could pave the way for a roll out of 3G
services by mid next year,” Mr Raja said.
The Minister had earlier said that
spectrum would be available by November. However, Government sources said that
the Defence was not willing to release spectrum unless
an alternate medium for communication was ready.
They said the Defence
might vacate 3G spectrum first because they were not using the band at present
while their equipment was still working on the 2G frequencies.
Source: The Hindu Business Line
Mobile telephony infrastructure being ramped up in rural
areas
M. Dinesh
Varma
CHENNAI:
As the new targets of mobile operators, rural subscribers come with a
straightforward profile—they use the hand-held phone for its original purpose
of communication.
Rural
Tamil Nadu is in the middle of a massive scale-up of
mobile telephony infrastructure, with service providers bracing up to establish
thousands of
Bharat
Sanchar Nigam Ltd is
pursuing plans for establishing at least 1,000
Airtel
is adding 20 new rural towns every month along Chennai’s suburbs and around 125
villages across the State. The medium-term goal is to extend coverage to 17,000
villages. According to a spokesman, the expansion plans involve extending reach
and setting up more base station towers.
Tata
Teleservices Ltd (TTSL) is scaling up its coverage to
around 500 new towns in the State by 2008 while Vodafone (formerly Hutch)
already covering over 900 towns and 9,000 villages through its network in Tamil
Nadu, expects to take the network to 1,500 towns and
over 16,000 villages by March 2008.
The
buzz of mobile telephony is certainly shifting to the rural segments. Typifying
the trend is a series of events in a tiny village with a population of barely
4,000 in Kancheepuram district.
At Kothimangalam, 50 km from Chennai, a road show is on
featuring a mike-fitted wagon with a noisy band belting out popular Tamil
tunes. The onslaught of decibels in this otherwise quiet hamlet and the
rain-drenched festoons dangling from every other paan
shop give the impression of an impending community festival. But the
celebration has to do with the arrival of a mobile operator in the neighbourhood. Airtel has just
commissioned a 35-metre high ground-based tower in the village, which barely
has 4,000 people.
Volunteers
are distributing sweets to everyone and in a day or two, a public meeting
featuring a ‘VIP’—probably the panchayat chief—will
be organised to explain mobile technology to the
villagers and the pre-paid schemes that are available.
“In a
rural market, we need to stir things up a bit with traditional campaign
material such as mobile music bands and distribution of pamphlets,” says an Airtel representative who oversees suburban coverage along Kancheepuram, Thiruvallur and
Often,
the level of dBm, the power to milliwatt
ratio used in radio, microwave and fiber optic networks scaling the minus 90
mark. In communication technology, the lower the dBm
level, the better the connectivity. “A dBm level of
60 is optimum for uninterrupted conversation,” says an Airtel
spokesman.
Source: The Hindu
Telecom
News dated