4G in India

India to adopt 4G Technology India plans to skip 3G and jump to 4G (4th generation) standards wireless technology. According to Dayanidhi Maran, the country's new minister for IT and communications, Current 3G services are not considered cost-effective enough and it is hoped that 4G might help reduce the expenses and stay on pace with the global market. Besides 4G networks could be the adequate tool to introduce broadband in rural areas: some 50,000 Indian villages do not have telephone facility. India's mobile telephony service providers are currently providing services based on GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), or CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technologies. "The 3G standard has been evolved, but has not proved cost-effective," said Maran in Delhi this week. "I therefore plan to leapfrog this generation and develop 4G technologies. India has an opportunity with its large market and high technical skills to be a significant player in this field. We are going to set up a National Center for Excellence in this area." The minister also rules out privatization of government-owned telecom services companies, such as BSNL and MTNL. The previous government had been pushing for privatization of some key government-owned companies. "I shall make all endeavors to make India the world's hub for outsourcing skilled manpower in the IT sector," he says. "India cannot hope to aspire to become a great IT nation without adequate level of research and development work. Toward this, our national R institutions would be given encouragement to invest in R and bring about world-class technologies." India also plans to have a national Internet exchange through which it hopes to connect all Internet service providers to achieve efficient Internet traffic routing, cost reduction, and improve the quality of service for the Internet users in India. The country also plans to migrate to Internet Protocol version 6 by 2006. "Worldwide, IPv6 is being implemented on the Internet to accommodate increased number of users and take care of security concerns," Maran says. On the whole we find India moving north... with new technologies coming in, outdated practices being trashed and young ministers stepping in INDIA seems to be clearer in its ideas and set to move north...