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After the remarkable cellular growth, all eyes are now pointing towards broadband growth in the country. In the last few years, the telecom industry has witnessed an incredible demand of bandwidth intensive services, and consequently, there has been continuous rise in the mobile broadband devices.

As per VOICE&DATA research, the overall broadband services market reached over Rs 7,500 crore in FY 2008-09, registering 40% growth over previous fiscal's Rs 5,359 crore.

The total broadband subscribers (residential and business users) in India have reached 6.3 mn in FY 2008-09, as compared to 3.9 mn in FY 2007-08. At present, the broadband market is dominated by players like BSNL, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Tata Communications, MTNL, Sify, and You Telecom.

While BSNL is the leader in the broadband market based on subscribers, Reliance Communications is the leading player based on revenues. Reliance Communications recorded revenues of Rs 2,356 crore in FY 2008-09, clocking 72% growth. Main growth for Reliance Communications came from enterprises.

Zooming Ahead
The past few years have been really interesting for the broadband market. The year gone by saw incredible demand for the services which need broadband capabilities. With a large young population, the urban region witnessed mass consumption of entertainment centric applications such as games, online movies, and music. On the other hand, concepts such as e-health, e-learning and e-chaupals are making significant headway among rural masses. If implemented properly, these initiatives can bring fruitful results in the long term.

The new technologies enabling higher bandwidth include VDSL and GEPON. VDSL will provide higher bandwidth over the same copper infrastructure to go beyond 8 Mbps, possibly up to 20 Mbps. Alternatively, where copper doesn't already exist, GEPON can provide up to 100 Mbps using fibre as a medium. Service providers are looking forward to these two promising technologies to break the 8 Mbps barrier faced with ADSL 2+.

Also, there was a buzz over 3G and WiMax services in FY 2008-09. The growth of wireline technology can never be sidelined by 3G and 4G. The bandwidth or capability of wireless technologies are still in a phase of obscurity when compared to wireline.

Notably, the average per consumer requirement for IPTV ranges from 3-4 Mbps for normal standard definition TV, and about 8 Mbps on HDTV. Therefore, enabling these sorts of dedicated per consumer bandwidths on any wireless technology is inconceivable. Wireline broadband offers many times higher bandwidth to users and enables speedy downloads, streaming video, and other heavy multimedia content.

As India increasingly adopts an online environment, more and more services are being made available online. Thus e-commerce is playing an important role in driving the segment. The other factors include faster download speeds, lower costs of equipments (like computers) to enable broadband access, increasing downloads of content (like music and movies) from the Internet, and other value added services (like gaming) on broadband, etc.

Bharti Airtel has gone a step further to popularize broadband amongst the youth by launching games on demand to cater to the youth, besides the introduction of innovative services (like video surveillance), which run on a broadband environment.

Last financial year saw the launch of improved content delivery such as television over IP networks (IPTV) on broadband. Airtel also launched its IPTV service-digital TV interactive-in January 2009 in Delhi, Ghaziabad and Noida. As of March 2009, it had close to 10.72 lakh customers subscribing to broadband (DSL) services.

It is currently making significant investments across its entire value chain, and intends to dominate the broadband market in the next two years.

You Telecom owns and manages the entire 1,455 kms of fiber optic network across eleven cities, thereby having complete control of the last mile to customers. The company has robust IT systems and processes in place that enable it to provide world class experience to customers. Though the company grew at about 12% in terms of customer base, it failed to make any progress in terms of revenue. It earned around Rs 100 crore revenue in FY 2008-09.

As a step towards enhancing user experience of the Internet, You Telecom has signed an agreement with Datacraft that will allow bandwidth to be monitored properly and ensure that the quality of services is maintained.

From users' point of view, the company claims to be the only ISP in India to fully get into online registration of connections.

The demand for broadband services is rapidly growing in the Indian market, and experts predict that increase in the adoption of FTTH technology will further boost this in the coming years.

In medium to long term, operators are expected to invest in making their cell sites access agnostic with cell site routers. This will enable them to assist both enterprises as well as connected home, real estate kind of service models.

The need for getting connected is emerging at a very fast pace in India. The urban market is reaching a level of maturity and is searching for high-speed broadband devices. However, rural domain is yet to be tapped. Poor computer literacy and infrastructure woes are some of the key issues which are making things complicated for providing broadband in rural areas.

As of now, BSNL seems to be the only force to reckon within the rural market. It has successfully introduced concepts like rural Internet dhaba in some of the places and committed to introduce more such concepts in the future.

It would be imperative for the vendors, service providers and decision makers to work towards understanding the issues to take the next step towards the broadband incursion in India. Though broadband has been the power packed agenda in the last few years, the lethargic approach and overambitious targets of the government are making things complicated for India.

Also, to create an impact, service providers would need to focus on providing an exemplary level of QoS while trimming overall costs through service-driven and mesh-based architectures.

In recent times, a large portion of the broadband growth has happened over copper. However, because of its limited availability, it cannot meet the requirements of the industry.

BSNL, the state run incumbent, has extended its contract with UTStarcom to support newly planned expansions of BSNL's multiplay network. In the first phase, UTStarcom deployed 1.3 mn broadband subscriber lines for BSNL with an additional 1.1 mn broadband subscriber lines during the second phase.

As BSNL's turnkey provider of multiplay network technology, UTStarcom will maintain full responsibility for design, planning, deployment, service rollout and maintenance of the network.

TTML will launch GSM services shortly, and is reusing its existing CDMA network infrastructure to a large extent to support the delivery of these new services. The company has also invested in upgrading its fiber network to Next Generation Network capability, to support the increased demand for broadband services. This permits the company to offer solutions such as the first 100 Mbps to the home retail broadband service in Mumbai.

Along with the demand for voice and wired broadband services, the industry is also seeing an emerging demand for wireless Internet access, and various kinds of value added services. With mobile screens outnumbering computer screens, wireless broadband is expected to be the next growth area for telecom companies.

MTNL is providing IPTV services on its broadband line, where subscriber can view more than 170 channels and other content
on video-on-demand. It has more than 6 lakh customers under its flagship broadband service called Triband.

WiMax Booms
In the present market scenario, there is a visible shortage of wired networks and providing basic connectivity appears to be an uphill task for operators. Considering this, WiMax seems to be the only hope for providing high broadband services in a cost-effective way.

Though BWA spectrum auction is still pending in India, the market seems to be open to the espousal of this technology.

Though operators like Bharti Airtel, BSNL and Reliance have already started to offer their WiMax services on 3.3 GHz, the industry is betting big on the BWA spectrum to introduce these services at a full-fledged level. With BWA spectrum, these players will be able to offer WiMax services on 2.3 and 2.5 GHz spectrum.

The country still has a huge rural area that needs to be covered. The operators are now heading towards rural destinations. In the times ahead, the country is expected to receive heavy investments in the mobile WiMax space. Players like Motorola, Soma Networks and Nokia Siemens are investing heavily on the mobile WiMax.

In the year gone by, the WiMax equipment market saw an incredible growth of about 239% in as against a growth rate of a minuscule 8% in FY 2007-08. Also, the market saw an increased push towards mobile WiMax, especially for providing services like M-care, M-commerce, M-learning and M-governance.

According to Voice&Data research, there is tremendous opportunity for WiMax technology in the Indian marketplace, and it is growing at a rapid pace.

Different Strokes
In FY 2008-09, India witnessed close to 2,50,000 subscriber additions in the fixed WiMax space. Out of these, around 2, 00,000 subscribers are with Tata Communications and Reliance Communications. Bharti Airtel and Aircel hold the rest of them. At present, the overall broadband penetration in the country is just over 6 mn, which is unimpressive considering the population of more than one billion. Tata Communications plans to bring broadband services to homes and small businesses around the country to meet this need.

Globally, mobile WiMax is expected to exist along with cellular access technologies (eg GSM/EDGE and WCDMA/HSPA family of technologies) because of the different business cases, licensing conditions and cost pyramids in different countries.

Reportedly, there are several new operators who are keen to make their debut on the podium. Among these, Russian operator Yota and Malaysian operator Packet One are reportedly in serious discussions with some of the Indian firms to enter into India's BWA market.

According to industry reports, Yota is discussing the business objectives with MTNL to enter into the booming Indian market.