Is India ready for its spectral future?

If The Fifth Dimension were still performing today, I am sure they would be lustily proclaiming that this is the “Age of Mobility” rather than the “Age of Aquarius” (a popular song of the late 1960s-early 1970s, from the musical, Hair ). Wherever we turn, it is a mad, mobile world with no one having the time “to stand and stare.”

We all want to consume an endless assortment of items while on the move — whether plain voice communication or messaging or e-mail or browsing, video entertainment, social media, financial services… If this is the age of mobility, then, inevitably, it also has to be the age of spectrum for, simply put, without spectrum, there can be no digital mobile connectivity.

The Centre’s vision of Digital India is completely dependent on modern digital communications, and hence on the availability of spectrum. The moot question is, therefore: How effectively are we preparing for this?

Lagging behind Most other countries are already far ahead of us in the digital ICT journey. The Geneva-based apex global telecom agency, ITU, rates India as low as 129 out of 166 countries in respect of digital development. We, thus, have a long way to go before we can aspire to realise the vision of Digital India.

Herein lies the challenge as well as the great opportunity for India. We have in a relatively short span of 10 to 15 years become one of the most enviable mobile economies of the world, probably second only to China, and now have close to a billion mobile connections. We have done this despite facing formidable challenges as regards adequacy of spectrum for mobile. We have had and still have less than 50 per cent of the total spectrum released for commercial mobile services in other countries.

For example, in the core mobile bands, according to TRAI, India has only 118.65 MHz against China’s 256 MHz, Europe’s 290 MHz and Malaysia’s 275 MHz. If looked at from the point of view of spectrum per population unit, the situation is even more bizarre. India is at 0.095 MHz per million population, whereas Europe is between 3 and 6, and Malaysia is 9.25!

The great opportunity for India lies in the fact that, basically, nature has endowed every nation with the same quantum of spectrum. Thus if we go about resolutely and effectively tapping all the spectrum resources available to us, we would surely get further ahead of most other countries. With a vision like Digital India powerfully capturing the imagination of the entire country, such an endeavour can well achieve the desired results in the near future.

Too many players Not only is the total quantum of spectrum for mobile less than half of other nations, India’s position is further aggravated by it being divided up among more market players. Thus, effectively, a mobile operator in India would have maybe a fourth or less of what his counterparts elsewhere would have.

Of course, India gets the benefit of increased competition; however, this needs to be tempered or optimised through other beneficial policies regarding M&A, spectrum trading and spectrum sharing.

The plans for Digital India and Smart Cities assume tremendous improvements or efficiencies in several areas, such as energy, ecology and transportation.

However, while exploiting the spectrum opportunity ahead, we need to clearly overcome the huge perils of fragmentation of spectrum that we are saddled with currently. It needs to be appreciated, for example, that in spectrum physics, two plus two is not four but a value much higher. This is because of the exponential benefit of spectrum trunking efficiency arising from larger and contiguous holdings of spectrum.

Four operators deliver twice as much capacity as 12 operators with the same total quantity of spectrum, say, 60 MHz. By fragmenting spectrum, one is actually destroying the capacity of the network. This is sinful in a resource-crunched and digitally-starved nation like ours. We have to consolidate our spectrum holdings on a high priority.

Another major fallout of fragmented spectrum is unsurprisingly related to energy consumption and efficiencies. With less spectrum per operator, there is inevitably the need for more towers to manage the subscriber demand with less spectrum. The proliferation of towers means a huge proliferation of diesel stand-by generating sets. Keeping in mind that we are talking in terms of 8 lakh base stations in the country today, this would translate into a horrendous amount of unwanted diesel consumption.

Guzzling power An international expert has estimated that due to its fragmented spectrum, India could be additionally consuming about 3.7GW power; this is equivalent to two large power stations or 15 million tonnes of diesel a year. With the growth in towers, we can expect that the position is greatly worsened.

Apart from its deleterious impact on energy consumption, fragmented spectrum creates unnecessary intrusions into the ecology and environment by the need for a larger number of towers. For instance, 12 operators require 6 times more sites than 4 operators; China needs to deploy only a quarter of our sites to achieve double our capacity.

The ITU’s World Radio Conference is coming up soon and all the administrations of the world will be lobbying for more spectrum to meet the explosive demand for bandwidth hungry services.

Mobile data traffic is already growing at 60-70 per cent annually. Global mobile data traffic is expected to increase tenfold between 2013 and 2018. Enormous amounts of additional spectrum would thus be essential for every nation and industry to serve the needs of customers and businesses in an acceptable manner.

ITU estimates that an average of anywhere between 1340 and 1960 MHz (totally) would be required by every country by 2020. The lower value in the range would obviously apply to low population density and low traffic situations. India would be on the high scenario estimate of at least 1960 MHz. In fact, specific expert estimations for India have shown the likely requirement to be as high as 2200 MHz.

India’s digital future is at stake. Serious spectrum reforms are urgently needed if we are to play a meaningful role in the spectral future. Ericsson’s CTO opined recently that spectrum will be more valuable/important than oil in the future. This is an understatement. Spectrum will, in fact, be vital for most facets of future living.

The writer is a consultant