Spanning 219 countries, the GSM Association (GSMA) is a group of nearly 800 mobile operators from around the world, as well as more than 200 companies in the mobile ecosystem, including handset makers, software companies, equipment providers, internet companies, and media and entertainment organisations. The GSMA’s aim is to drive the growth of the mobile communications industry. Supriya Bhattacharjee of Telecom Yatra spoke to GSMA’s senior director Robhindra Mangtani about LTE versus WiMax, mobile money, green energy, GSMA’s current focus and the future of the Indian telecom industry.Voice over LTE is an initiative of the GSMA along with operators, and this basically is to decide the next generation standard for voice. As you know, LTE is a packet system; it doesn’t have a circuit switch component like 3G does. Thus, you need a next generation voice platform and that’s where this initiative comes in.

It is being worked upon by operators along with manufacturers and suppliers. Clearly, this may be one of the options in the marketplace; there may be others. This initiative will help to get a standard for voice over LTE. And also, you still need connectivity with other legacy networks such as GSM and 3G. So we are supporting all these initiatives as well.We think increasing mobile broadband penetration in India is very important. Mobile broadband has some compelling reasons for deployment in India including rural connectivity, e-governance and UIDAI (unique identification authority of India).Once people start using mobile broadband, there will be an increased demand for it. Thus, we think the government should look at allocating more spectrum. We think LTE is the future. The reason why we say this is backwards compatibility. So, if I give you an LTE product, it will always have a backwards connectivity with 3G, EDGE, GPRS and 2G. You are never going to lose connectivity.We expect the incremental 3G data revenue for mobile operators to cross Rs 67 billion in 2015, growing at a CAGR of 109 per cent over the next five years.I can’t give you the numbers. The GSMA development fund is being funded by operators and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Right now the main focus is on mobile money for the unbanked. On this, we are doing trials with operators in Africa and showing the capabilities of the mobile system and how mobile money can be used by people who earn less than a dollar a day. In Kenya, there is a service called m-pesa and right now about 8 million people are using the service.
 
In India, Bharti has launched its own service and the plan in India is to actually engage at the regulatory and policy level, to encourage use of the mobile as a platform for mobile money and mobile banking. Our focus is on getting the RBI to encourage mobile banking.There are two answers to this: Firstly, the technology has changed. In olden days, the BTS (base transceiver station) generated so much heat that it required cooling and you had to use big Acs to cool it, which consumes much more energy. As technologies moved on, the new BTS is ten times more efficient than those in the older days. Now, it does not need air conditioning and it can run on air cooling. The design has changed completely.
 
Secondly, taking into account the new technologies and the way chips are designed, there is a much lesser requirement of energy and it is multi per cent more efficient. So take that, take the low energy consumption and shut down those base stations which are not being used, then you can talk about putting solar panels and wind power.
 
In fact, India is at an advantage. Indus and GTL (telecom infrastructure companies) are running towers that are being shared by operators and actually, in other countries, that is not the case, where every operator has its own towers. So india is well placed from a government policy point of view. If the incentives are put in place to encourage green power and infrastructure sharing, which is being done already, you will see massive implementation of green power.We have a complete green power in telecom programme. We have a target of 119 towers and base stations running on green power by 2011. We are trying to find out a solution on the regulatory front. We are in talks with almost all big operators in India for this. We think it is very important to have a clear and transparent regulatory regime and we are still stressing on that. We have also said in the past that spectrum should be allowed to be traded. GSMA runs the IMEI database and it allocates IMEI to manufacturers. In India, there are some unique things going on. There is the grey market, then fake IMEIs and IMEI cloning going on. The government has already taken some steps to control fake IMEIs. The issue of cloning needs to be addressed by the device manufacturers; it’s not something we have control over as an association.