CDMA-alive-and-well Watch: good news from India?

For the last month or so, media, analysts and bloggers have offered comment about the news that India has overtaken China to become the world's largest CDMA market. This was announced last month by the CDMA Development Group (CDG), the trade association whose role is to foster the worldwide development, implementation and use of CDMA2000 technologies.

According to the CDG, "there are now more than 100 million CDMA subscribers in India". This figure, however, is some distance from the number provided by the Informa Telecoms & Media World Cellular Information Service, according to which there were 77.1 million Indian CDMA subs by the end of March. According to WCIS figure, this rose from 72.6 million as of December 2008 and 66.6 million as of September 2008 - fairly consistent growth of about 5 million subs per quarter. If the WCIS figure are accurate, it's hard to imagine a sudden leap to 100 million subs by late May.

As well as impressive-sounding subcription numbers, the CDG press release also featured warmly supportive quotes from India's two leading CDMA operators:

"CDMA is a technology that allows a rich telecom experience, especially on the data side, and we are confident that in the years to come that experience will only get better, especially as 3G arrives and we are able to unleash the full potential of applications and services," said Mr. Anil Sardana, Managing Director of Tata Teleservices.

"We remain committed to further grow and serve our ever-increasing CDMA customer base through innovative applications, superior network quality and service and attractive value-propositions," said Mr. S.P. Shukla, President, Wireless of Reliance Communications.

The latter quote is interesting in light of an assertion by Informa Telecoms & Media that "India’s Reliance has also been looking to sideline CDMA for GSM/WCDMA" - a comment made in the analyst firm's Asia Pacific Mobile Market Analysis and Forecasts report, which was released this month.

That phenomenon of CDMA operators favouring the W-CDMA/HSPA flavour of mobile broadband over the CDMA family EV-DO route is, of course, not unique. The Informa report asserts that South Korea's "CDMA stalwarts" SK Telecom and KT "are vigorously pursuing HSDPA." The report contends that this will further the degree to which CDMA operators face disadvantages when competing with GSM/W-CDMA rivals, stating that "as Asia Pacific operators jump on the HSDPA bandwagon, handset pricing will continue to fall, meaning that EV-DOrA operators will struggle to compete on handset price. The same argument applies to EV-DOrA network prices."

Whichever set of numbers you choose to work with, then, (the CDG's 100 million vs. Informa's 77 million), it will be interesting to observe for how much longer India's CDMA subs growth continues and is cited as evidence for CDMA technology being in rude health.

CDMA-alive-and-well Watch: good news from India?

Reaching rural communities in Mongolia

According to a Cellular News report this week, Chinese telecoms equipment vendor ZTE has announced the world's first overlay of a W-CDMA network on an existing CDMA service to realise UMTS/CDMA convergence at the core network level.

The customer is Mongolian CDMA MNO Skytel, a joint venture company established by Mongolian and South Korean investors in 1999, the latter including SK Telecom. While this is a global first in terms of the UMTS/CDMA convergence feature, market-leading GSM MNO MobiCom has already launched 3G services, having launched the country's first high-speed mobile broadband network in the country in April, powered by HSPA technology from Ericsson.

Skytel, which has gone on to carve out a 20.08% share of the Mongolian mobile market (by March 2009, according to WCIS), also competes with Unitel (GSM standard) which has rapidly built a 22.01% market share since commencing operations in June 2006. In terms of eroding the market share of its longer-established competitors, the entry of Unitel has made a much bigger impact on MobiCom than on Skytel.

One more operator makes up the quartet of mobile service providers in Mongolia - G-Mobile, which won a Government tender in 2006 specifically to establish a CDMA service to connect rural Mongolians with the country’s main telephone grid. G-Mobile has since established a market share of just 6.25%.

Although Mongolia has become increasingly urbanised in recent years, with about 40% of the population living in the capital city, and a further 23% living in other towns, a significant minority continue to live in extremely small, remote settlements and on a semi-nomadic basis. As demonstrated by the G-Mobile tender, extending communications services to these people is important for the country's telecoms sector as a whole.

With this in mind, MobiCom signed a three-year managed services contract last year with Altobridge, an Irish company which has developed technology designed to minimise backhaul bandwidth utilisation, thereby making the delivery of mobile communications to small, remote communities a more compelling proposition for MNOs. This deployment won an award earlier this year from the country's leading tech publication and the national Information Communication Technology Authority, who wanted to recognise the positive impact the Altobridge solution is having on communities and enterprises in remote parts of Mongolia. The Altobridge CEO Mike Fitzgerald said at the time of the award that he was delighted that MobiCom had received praise for connecting people still cut off from the benefits of mobile communications. He stressed that this was consistent with a for-profit motive for the operator.

I am always encouraged to read of telecoms solutions improving lives in developing countries. Having met a handful of friendly people from Mongolia's operators at conferences, I'll be interested to see what impact Skytel and MobiCom's recently commenced 3G services have - I'm not yet clear if these services will be aimed purely at higher margin urban customer segments or whether a rural 3G services business case has been calculated.

Reaching rural communities in Mongolia