Accept it! It’s going no-where at present. The moment, some of leading Indian Telecom operators started talking about WiFi, industry listened them earnestly. But after rounds of rounds discussions, we are still away from any conclusion.
I remember the time, when Airtel talked about WiFi. It’s quite easy for them to launch on the back of leading equipment vendors. Things went quite well for Airtel, who now operates more than few thousand WiFi Hotspots across country.
The story is quite different for the followers- the companies like Idea Cellular & Vodafone India, who are doing rounds of discussions with leading equipment vendors in WiFi domain to launch their services.
The only problem here is- lack of clarity. Despite floating closed RFP few months back and receiving positive bidding from leading equipment makers & SIs, the operators are little more than uncertain to launch the services.
Vodafone, who is currently in discussions with IBM-Ruckus, Cisco, Ericsson & NSN along with some other equipment makers, has gone ahead with focus on targeting enterprise segment for launch of WiFi services. But despite rounds of bidding, things are quite floating. The model, Vodafone is quite keen to sort out is the best pricing to launch some 10K+ APs across India in first phase, which also includes the supplies of active & passive equipments.
For Idea, the focus is on residential segment. Idea Cellular is quite keen on replicating the Tikona Digital’s Wi-Bro Residential model success in few of the select cities to start with. In fact, there’re rumors that Ruckus, the leading WiFi equipment makers, has bagged the partial order to start with. But it couldn’t be confirmed yet.
While Vodafone India has revealed the five years plan for rolling out WiFi services across India, Idea Cellular is more inclined to soft launch of services in select towns, though none of them is willing to talk about budgets or numbers at present.
One more hurdle seems to be delaying bidding- recent TRAI’s ordeal to integrate Indian manufacturer’s equipment, starting this year in phased manner. Telcos’ dilemma is dual- none of the Indian equipment makers can compete with global OEMs on technology front, though cost advantage could outweigh them.
We are likely to see the closure of bidding process by next month end and there’s will some soft launches by end of year or first quarter of next year.
What’s missing really? Willingness to be aggressive in uncertain regulatory environment, but none of them are quite bothered about it.
