WiMax in India?

 Publish by Business Week(12.40.08) and fobes( 03.04.08):-

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2008/gb20080312_479990.htm?campaign_id=rss_tech

http://www.forbes.com/2008/03/04/india-wimax-mobile-tech-wire-cx_ew_0304india.html

Tata Communications unveils an ambitious plan to become global leader in wireless broadband by launching the world's largest commercial network.

•  On Mar. 4, 2008 India's Tata Communications , an emerging broadband player, announced the countrywide rollout of a commercial WiMax network, the largest anywhere in the world of the high-speed, wireless broadband technology.
  
• Already 10 Indian cities and 5,000 retail and business customers use the product, and by next year Tata will offer service in 115 cities nationwide. The folks at Tata can hardly contain their excitement. "WiMax is not experimental, it's oven-hot," says Tata's Prateek Pashine, in charge of the company's broadband and retail business.
  
• Tata Communications, aims to blanket India in WiMax, a super-speedy version of wireless broadband, by March 2009. The plan will cost more than $100 million and span 115 Indian cities. 
• The goal: to provide 20 million broadband connections by 2010, a target set by the Indian government.
  
• The wireless technology is fast, covers broad areas, penetrates buildings well and can be rolled out rapidly. Tata is further speeding up the process by mounting WiMax equipment on cellular towers owned by its sister company, carrier Tata Teleservices.
• Intel, whose silicon chips power WiMax,  "The more countries and telcos that get behind this technology the better," says R. Sivakumar, chief executive of Intel South Asia. 
  
• It has used the technology from Telsima, a Sunnyvale (Calif.) maker of WiMax base-stations and the leading WiMax tech provider in the world. For now, the technology will be restricted to fixed wireless, but Tata plans to make it mobile by midyear. 
• The company has invested about $100 million in the project, which will increase to $500 million over the next four years as it begins to near its goal of having 50 million subscribers in India.
  
• "If it doesn't succeed in India, it will be difficult [for it to succeed] anywhere else. In fact, even with as many as seven broadband providers in the market, the total Indian subscriber base is just 3.2 million and there is no clear market leader. But with the WiMax rollout Tata can gain a leadership position and add "a few thousand subscribers a day," says Alok Sharma, chief executive of Telsima.
  
• But also important is the ordinary Indian retail customer who can watch movies via WiMax and enjoy Tata's other unique offerings. For instance, users can take in an early morning worship service at the famous Balaji temple in South India. The temple permitted Tata to install cameras so that Hindu devotees from around the world could watch the proceedings in the temple around the clock. To get connected initially, users will simply have to go to a store, buy a router, install it, and then they become instantly connected. It will be as easy as buying apples, Tata executives promise.
  
• Access will cost about $25 a month.