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Though the Indian telecom industry leap-frogged from analogue wire-line to GSM-CDMA wireless duo, and witnessed a huge wireless growth, it is seriously dented the wire-line growth. India today boasts of 48+ Mn fixed line homes with almost negligent wire-line growth.
India is possibly the only country where the numbers of cable homes are more than the Fixed Phones. Majority of the 48+ Mn copper wired homes are owned by the incumbent operators BSNL / MTNL. The BSNL / MTNL deployed network asks for huge refurbishing of its copper lines in a way asking for a large investment and deployment. In such a situation, the cable operators are strongly positioned with the last mile access (though overhead at most places). Infact a significant percentage of LCOs has invested in building a Fiber-Ethernet network for Internet access. On the flip side, cable operators face a serious image issue, they are fragmented and lack technical expertise to pull up its product.

For Telcos, it is a choice between the Devil and Deep Blue Sea. Operators do not know whether to co-opt or to compete.

Cable operators are not restricting themselves to the Fiber-Ethernet mode. They have a two-pronged strategy to combat new technologies like IPTV and DTH, which is digitizing the entire network and offering consumers more channels and content at the same cost. They intend to offer set-top box on an easy-payment basis. It is also pushing high-speed broadband Internet into the homes and bundling the same with Cable TV. Thus, Hathway plans to offer in its universe analog cable TV services, digital cable TV services and bundling with high-speed broadband Internet. Today, the cable operators are competing in high risk but low brand value environment.

Interactive walled garden services can provide a boost to IPTV business case for broadband and wire line TELECOM operators. STB development has come a long way; preliminary IP Boxes had low RAM, low processing power, low-end browser and which would support limited interactivity. Today, an odd $ 150 box can support and work like a mini-computer with 32-64 Mb RAM, 500+ MHz processing power, has high-end browser to support best of animations, flash, java and the much needed plug-in support. Effectively meaning that the changing STBs will allow the user to browse Internet, play videos, define his play-list for songs like the PC, do mailing applications, will provide a USB drive to store content, share pictures, attach a keyboard or a gaming console and what not. On a very positive note as the operators start moving up on the deployment scale, the odd $ 150 figure will definitely come down.

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* Contributed by: -
Piyush Upadhyay,
Management Graduate from Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management, Pune,
Currently working with Airtel Broadband & Telephone Services.