Qualcomm’s Bid for BWA Spectrum – WiMax Forum Protests

Qualcomm which changed and diluted its arrogance stand on its proprietary CDMA chip sets by promoting the Open Market Handset Alliance last year has realized the potential, a country with billion hands offers to it, and has now gone to an extra mile to bid for Broadband Wireless Access Spectrum. We believe Qualcomm is late into the game, as the powerful WiMax forum backed by Intel has already got the BWA Spectrum tuned to its requirements [2.3GHz though the Government Document says –  There are broadly no restrictions on the technology to be adopted for providing services in the 3G Spectrum and BWA Spectrum] . Nevertheless, Qualcomm can offer similar service. According to Mr. Atul Deshpande an RF expert,

LTE can work on 2.3GHz but access method will be TDD, which is adopted by China.

As expected, Mr. Rao representing the WiMax forum in India has come out in the open against Qualcomm’s bid,

I am concerned that this move by Qualcomm, if they emerge as winners in the bid, may result in the hoarding of precious spectrum for another two or three years. Thus, India would lose an opportunity serve 20 million subscribers on a slot of 20Mhz by 2012. India cannot afford losing such precious resource of spectrum for immature ,untested and unproven technologies. Let India not be used as experimentation aground and in my view it is not good to make India to stop on the growth of broadband using wireless technology like WiMax.

Well, what else can you expect from the Lobbyists  😉 Data proves that WiMax in India is a complete failure till date and hence the first two operators, Reliance Communications and Tata Indicom / Photon quietly moved from WiMax to EVDO based wireless broadband which is being envied by every GSM operator.

Now take a guess, can someone like Modi’s of Spice [say in association with Alcatel Lucent, even this company has TD-LTE capability] can throw their hat for the BWA Spectrum and enter the services area as an ISP and offer the complete bouquet using the latest technologies. Its exciting as we head towards an era of convergence.