they are shifting their focus to GSM. This means that capex, marketing, subsidies, shelf space and management attention are all going to move towards their GSM network...
...with CDMA growth in India declining from what it would be if things were different in India, but CDMA has been disadvantaged from the beginning of mobile in India, and especially stymied since the last elections. Still, the worm turns, there will be future elections, and the progressive forces that opened the door for CDMA operators to consumers' advantage may regain some strength.
BSNL, Bharti, COAI and the GSM lenders and vendors have had and retain the upper political hand, but Reliance spoiled the sweet thing they had going and their noisy move into GSM has not been accompanied by release of spectrum to them, therefore they're bidding on the existing player. Within the disinformation campaign ciol.com, DoT said last summer Reliance might have to give up CDMA spectrum to get GSM spectrum ciol.com, and apparently Reliance is not going that route, or selling their CDMA spectrum, network and subscribers. It's the it would speed up their transition to GSM. that seems over the top because there would seem to be real value to Reliance in expanding and evolving their CDMA network when 3G licensing and spectrum allocation is decided.
2G GSM/1x chipsets from Qualcomm -- with the voice-centric services nearly equivalent, were they priced for mass market before? Is it apples to apples, comparing <$50 GSM handsets to <$100 multiband, multimode handsets that can do DO, or are those just slideware. If Qualcomm's obsessively throwing money away on the idea as a false step toward real convergence, then that certainly sucks. |
