October 24th, 2008
Electricity is the Bottleneck for Mobile Penetration in Rural India
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(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)
Atanu Dey on why electricity is the bottleneck for mobile usage in rural India –
We don’t usually associate telecommunications with power. But cellular towers don’t work on love and fresh air (and fresh air is not something that you can take for granted, anyway.) They require power and in areas where the grid is unreliable, you have to spend fairly large sums on diesel generator sets. That, among others, is a major problem in rural India. The cost of energy accounts for a third of the operating costs of a cellular network, I am told. Higher costs means higher prices. So what’s to be done.
I am a firm believer in the market. The market figures out a solution. Recently I came across a firm that has developed cellular technology that is miserly in the use of electricity. It does not require grid and can do without diesel generator sets. It is VNL, a Swedish Indian company. As they claim, “VNL’s WorldGSM™ is the industry’s first microtelecom solution; a complete re-engineering of GSM for the billions of low-income, rural users.”
