Centre plans to give 12 million mobiles to the poor

mangaloretoday.com

New Delhi, Sept 23: The government plans to use over 12 million low-cost CDMA-based handsets currently stored by private telecom companies to facilitate its mega scheme to empower the poor with 2.5 crore mobiles.

At present, the handsets are lying unused and dumped in warehouses in India and China.

 

 

State-owned BSNL, which has been chosen to facilitate this pan-India mobile scheme for the poor, wants to cash in on it.

Although it has built a pan-India CDMA network and has spectrum in the 800 MHz band in all 20 telecom circles it operates, it has fewer than 5 million subscribers on this platform, compared about 100 million subscribers who use its GSM services.

Officials said loss-making BSNL could be allowed to lease out its CDMA mobile network to private operators.

Sources said BSNL under the new National Telecom Policy-2012 can lease out its CDMA network as a Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) to private telcos.

The business model of an MVNO involves buying airtime from existing operators that own telecom infrastructure (the BSNL) and selling it to consumers under their own brand and companies.

BSNL, which will select the mobile phone on the basis of competitive bidding, has accumulated a loss of Rs 25,258 crore in the past four years. With over 10 crore of the 90 crore mobile subscribers, its market share is 11.22 per cent.

Strangely, DoT had conducted a pilot project with a help of private telecom companies involving over 150 self-help groups of poor women in Noida, near the national capital, to study the impact of mobile use by the poor. But DoT had not found the project very encouraging.

According to an official, poor women involved in the pilot project did not benefit as they were illiterate and the mobile phones were misused and even sold.

The scheme will be funded through the Universal Services Obligations Fund - a fund to facilitate telecom services in rural areas.

What is CDMA?

CDMA, or Code Division Multiple Access, is a competing cell phone service technology to GSM.

It uses a ’spread-spectrum’ technique where electromagnetic energy is spread to allow for a signal with a wider bandwidth. This allows multiple people on multiple cell phones to be ’multiplexed’ over the same channel to share a bandwidth of frequencies.