Aircel to expand Wimax services
12 Mar 2007
The mobile services provider had recently announced the launch of its 3G services.
Launching its services in Chennai last October, ABS will be offering the service in 44 Indian cities by the end of this year.
Currently ABS offers WiMax service in Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. ABS has also deployed WiMAX networks with limited coverage in many prominent cities such as Coimbatore, Pune, Delhi, Cochin and Ahmedabad. As the hardware is expensive, ABS currently targets corporates, small and medium enterprises.
However with these costs likely to move southwards the market will evolve from fixed WiMAX (802.16d) to mobile WiMAX (802.16e) enabling more number of applications and services. Further, due to the increasing interoperability among vendors, the cost of customer premises equipment (CPE) – a key component in WiMAX deployment – would drastically come down making it affordable to the retail and residential segments, opine industry officials. According to them, even now it is possible to connect multiple apartments in the same building through a local area network (LAN) connection with everybody sharing a common CPE.
Meanwhile ABS is getting an enthusiastic response from prospective customers, more so from those who are setting up new offices/branches, as WiMax is the latest technological offering. However ABS officials have to spend time to provide comfort levels to customers about the security features. Unlike cable internet, the service uptime in the case of WiMax is high and 99 per cent in the case of ABS.
Forecasts suggest that the WiMAX subscriber base in India alone is likely to cross the 12-million mark by 2012.
