RailTel and WiMax related announcements

Two articles over the weekend that were important from standpoint of improving broadband connectivity in India. One was by RailTel, which announced its intentions to lease out its giant raliway telecom network to external clients. Railways has one of the most extensive OFC networks in the country amounting to 30,000 route KMs, a lot of which winds into the rural hinterland. Hence, effective use of this infrastructure could make vastly superior economic sense as compared to a greenfield rollout. As I mentioned before in an earlier post, one of the reasons for the stunted growth in internet in India was that – we seem to be caught in a circular loop where in lack of rural connectivity is stalling the development of localized applications and also vice versa. This may be one of the innovative parts to a solution that could help break that gridlock.
The other important development is w.r.t announcements by telco majors that they were finally preparing for a WiMax rollout in the country. There are still some issues w.r.t the exact spectrum band that are as yet unclarified. But, the fact that operators are going ahead with announcements gives hope that they see resolution of the same in due course. That should hopefully improve the broadband connectivity in cities significantly. I guess if both these announced plans go as per plan, we could see an improvement in internet adoption in our country.