Broadband in India: Operating Expenses

By Sujai Karampuri, Guest Author

As I discussed in the previous post, the drivers for penetration of broadband in India will be-

* Decreasing cost per line
* Decreasing operating expense
* Decreasing cost of PC (or similar device)
* Social attitudes and habits embracing broadband facilities
* More Indian content

In this post, I will analyze the decreasing operating expenses.

Look at who is going to provide the bulk of broadband services in India. They are all major operators who already have cellular and landline networks. While laying out the WiMAX networks, those operators will combine the operations with the existing operating premises thus incurring marginal increase in costs while deploying and managing wireless broadband services.

We will see more and more infrastructure sharing between various operators which was completely absent till now. Especially, in rural networks, this infrastructure sharing will turn out to be mere common sense. The operators who own the spectrum will resell the spectrum to other smaller players who will mushroom in various parts of India to cater to non-metros. The towns and villages may not be very attractive to some operators right away and they may like to sell this franchise or sell these frequencies to smaller WISPs and operators. Also, the coming of Virtual Network Operators will add to competition.

This segment is a part in the series : Broadband in India