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India To Be Isolated from Global 3G

28th September, 2004

India : The GSM Association (GSMA) today encouraged the Indian Government to maintain its alignment with the global community and protect the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) recommended IMT2000 core band for 3G services.

Inset is GSMA Chairman Craig Ehrlich quoted below.

The GSMA urged the country’s telecoms regulator to veto a proposal that would effectively isolate India from the global mobile market, a risk that would undermine the current growth and development of the country’s telecommunications industry and restrict the ability of mobile users to roam internationally.

“In identifying the core 3G spectrum band back in 1992, the ITU – the United Nation’s telecommunications agency – realised the importance of long term stability in spectrum policy. Through economies of scale, globally harmonised spectrum will make a major contribution to connecting the unconnected. This proposal is a direct attack on all that the ITU has achieved in this regard,” said Ehrlich.

The Indian regulator is currently considering a proposal to release spectrum at 1900 MHz that not only favours specific technologies, but also directly overlaps and clashes with the ITU band, reserved globally for 3G services. The 1900 MHz band is often referred to as the “US PCS” band.

Speaking at the 3GSM World Congress Asia, GSMA Chairman Craig Ehrlich said: “If the US PCS band is allocated in India, then the Indian people will be denied the benefit of unrestricted access to global roaming in the 3G world and the dynamic Indian IT and telecommunications industries will suffer.

“This proposal is a short term fix that could do untold long-term harm to the country and its development of advanced third generation services. India is one of the success stories of the wireless world and this proposal is at odds with the country’s strategic growth on the global stage,” he added.

TRAI, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India, has proposed releasing spectrum in the “PCS” band (1850-1910 MHz paired with 1930-1990 MHz) to operators of second-generation mobile services. However, the upper band is part of the ITU-defined core radio spectrum for 3G services and has been allocated as such in the vast majority of countries, worldwide.

With just 7.74 telephone connections (fixed and mobile) per hundred inhabitants, mobile is central to India’s drive to improve access to telecommunications. This year, India’s GSM operators have connected six million new users - 80% of all new mobile subscribers and 55% of all new telephone connections.

The Association also pointed out that 90 percent of the world’s mobile operators that have been awarded licences to deploy 3G services, have been granted IMT2000 core band spectrum on a technology neutral basis.

Many GSM operators in other countries are now upgrading their networks with 3GSM, which combines significantly increased capacity for conventional voice calls with high speed data and multimedia services. Fifty operators have already launched 3GSM commercially and at least 70 networks are expected to be in service by the year-end.

With this momentum, 3GSM is beginning to replicate the success of GSM, which currently serves more than 1.1 billion customers across some 208 countries and territories. Growing economies of scale are driving down the cost of 3GSM infrastructure and handsets making this highly efficient technology an increasingly attractive option to sustain India’s booming mobile market.

As the global trade association representing more than 660 second and third generation mobile operators, the GSMA has recently established a Spectrum Management Group to monitor spectrum policy issues worldwide, facilitate the exchange of this knowledge among its members and provide input to national, regional and international regulatory and standards bodies.

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