What? 4G, In India? We have had a torrid time implementing the 3G spectrum and license and now that first of the 3G Services have started trickling in, Motorola wants to do a trial run of 4G in India! Technology changes with day and our slow government took lot of time selling 3G mobile phones and wanted to raise about Rs 35,000 crores from trading radio frequency for the existing version. But now, Motorola brings in the next level 4G phones. This could mean spoiling the broth for the government’s plans.
4G can offer upto 70 Mbps download speed on a mobile phone. We don't have those kinds of speeds even on our broadband networks today. That is in a normal broaband network, whereas it takes 4-5 hours for downloading an film with an average space of 700 MB- 1.5 GB, with the advent of 4G, the same movie can be downloaded in 10-30 minutes. Ofcourse, it will come our way with a huge premium, but it could also save lots of online time. This technology is known as Long-Term Evolution(LTE). Lots of research on this technology has been done by American electronics majors Motorola, Verizon and also by Japan's NTT DoCoMo which has a JV with Tata Communications for rolling out 2G GSM services across India.
The DoT(Department of Telecom) is understood to have prepared a concept paper on 4G. Apart from Motorola, other telecom vendors are also in the process of trials in India. Many services providers would wait and watch the growth of 4G. This may affect the enthusiasm for getting spectrum from the government for 3G networks. Government had earlier planned to rake in Rs.35,000 crores by auctioning 3G spectrum. More the delay in the 3G auction, more the pain for Government's exchequer.
It also shows how slow the government process can be in India . When countries around the world are all providing high quality 4G network, getting started with 3G network in India is in itself proving to be a big hurdle. In the end, people are the real sufferers because they are forced to use hapless 2G GSM network which is quiet inferior in speed and voice quality when compared to 3G, leave alone 4G.
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