There will be 13 million WiMAX subscribers in India by 2012 according to Maravedis Research and Tonse Telecom, leaders in broadband wireless research and analysis, who partnered to produce a new research report entitled “India Broadband Wireless and WiMAX Market Analysis and Forecasts 2006-2012.”

“More than 70% of Indian households do not have access to fixed wired telephone services. Instead, customers have flocked to cellular phone carriers, which have built a tremendous infrastructure to provide service to more than 100 million customers” says Adlane Fellah, co-author of the report and Senior Analyst with Maravedis Inc.

Broadband services were launched in India in 2005. ADSL services now cover 300 towns with 1.5 million connections while broadband wireless subscriber figures are still negligible. In a country where monthly broadband ARPU is estimated at $8-10, and computer penetration is still at around 4%, BWA / WiMAX adoption will depend on very low cost end-to-end pricing for connectivity including the compute platform and CPE. The Indian telecom sector operates in a volume-driven market. If WiMAX is to succeed it will only be on the premise of huge volumes not, small deployments

“Bharti TeleVentures, Reliance, BSNL and VSNL (Tata Group) have all acquired licenses in 3.3GHz range and are in various stages of trials and modest commercial deployments. Maravedis Tonse has gathered evidence that larger deployments will start to materialize in early 2007 but volumes in the millions will take a few years to materialize. The planned release of additional spectrum will be critical to this” explained Fellah.

“However, shortage of spectrum is a serious obstacle for massive adoption of broadband wireless and WiMAX in India. For WiMAX to prosper in India, license holders will need at least 20MHz of spectrum while they currently hold 12MHz or less. 20MHz is a minimum to support wide scale deployments and hence a profitable business case” added Sridhar, co-author of the report and CEO of Tonse Telecom

Government appears to be serious about solving the problem by releasing some of the spectrum from the departments of Space and Defense and the TRAI is currently engaged in a critical public consultation. Wireless adoption is essential if the government wishes to meet its ambitious plans.