Wimax via Motorola sets soon

November 28, 2006

Wimax is the next hot thing in the Indian telecom market. After rolling out the first Made-in-India mobile,
Motorola plans to cash in on the demand for wireless broadband (high speed Internet) in the country. The world's second largest maker of mobiles is in discussions with telecom operators to provide network and equipment for offering Wimax (high-speed Internet access over a wireless connection).

The annual broadband wireless equipment market
opportunity in India is pegged at around $4.5 billion by '12 and Motorolavis keen to bite into this pie. "Motorola will design networks and provide customer premises equipment (CPEs) and handhelds. Our end-to-end solutions will be deployed by operators beginning next October," Mr Amit Sharma, vice-president, strategy and business development, Motorola Asia Pacific said.

India is targeting 30 million broadband (high speed Internet)
users by 2010 while the current base is just 2 million. The most difficult part of providing broadband access is last mile, the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer, as it requires
fanning out of wires and cable.

Wimax is an easy solution as it doesn't require a direct line of sight between the source and endpoint. With a service range of 50 km, Wimax supports peak data rates of 23 Mbps. Samsung and Alcatel are other vendors eyeing the Indian wireless broadband market.

Mr Sharma said Motorola is undertaking pilots for Wimax in
some areas. "It's much easier to deploy Wimax access points and power requirements are also less (compared to wireline networks). We don't think this is a replacement for mobiles. Wimax will be used for data
applications while cellular networks will continue to be used for voice services," said Mr Sharma.

Existing service providers can
overlay their cellular networks with Wimax while new entrants can use Wimax for
greenfield installations of broadband networks.

Motorola Wimax handhelds will be a PDA-like device, with high computing powers for data access. While CPEs and handhelds will be imported to begin with, manufacturing is likely to be localised over time. Motorola is already setting up a mobiles manufacturing facility at Sriperumbudur, near Chennai.

Intel is the technology partner for Motorola. "Intel is supplying us chips. We box them and give it to service providers," Mr Sharma said, adding that Wimax will allow the country to leap from from the 2.5G voice-centric networks to 4G data-centric networks.