Republic of India Population: 1,080,264,400 Capital City:
New Delhi Currency:
Indian Rupee (INR) Official National Language: Hindi Major Regional Languages:
Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam
The WCA's interest in developing its international reach and helping members showcase developments abroad has resulted in the creation of this web portal, designed with the goal of driving investment and providing a useful wealth of regional contact and background information, as well as up-to date news and telecom trends on the Indian market.
As India sits, poised to align upcoming spectrum auctions with crucial wireless broadband technology choices, many WCA members have begun to focus both their attention and resources on the region. Currently behind China in broadband connectivity, India's lack of an abundant fixed-line infrastructure has lead to its logical decision to pursue wireless WiMAX technology in outfitting a volume driven industry primed for large scale deployments.
The momentum is building in this exciting new market, confirmed by Maravedis Research who recently released a report projecting that there will be 13 million WiMAX subscribers in India by 2012.
VSNL's Senior Vice President of Network Planning & Implementation, Alin Jayant, discusses India's next-generation strategies for the upcoming year. Jayant served on the WCA 2006's "Meeting Broadband Wireless Operator Needs In High-Growth Markets" panel, moderated by Aperto Networks' Manish Gupta.
A distinguished and recently reelected (2006) member of the Indian Parliament, Baijayant "Jay" Panda leads the Parliamentary Party (Rajya Sabha), Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and serves on the Parliamentary Consultative Committee for the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Business Advisory Committee as a special invitee. Mr. Panda was a pioneer in India's broadband and wireless deployments at his former company, Ortel Communications, and has spoken at several WCA conventions.
