India to lead mobile internet boom: Qualcomm

Q: You have invested in the BWA spectrum in India; there was this talk about you talking to the established players. I do not know whether you are going to take names but are those discussions progressing along satisfactory lines?

A: It is going well and we are very happy to see that the market has moved to LTE as the preferred technology. Before we bought the spectrum, it was like it was all going WiMax which was a technology we didn't really favour. The WiMax promoters almost started that as an anti-Qualcomm effort and this was in the bad old days when there were tensions between us and some of the other guys. But we are very happy to see it going to LTE and I think it is a much more compelling thing for the operators because they tap into a much larger global market.

Q: I am going to ask you about the big daddy that made a national foray into BWA - Reliance Industries, acquiring spectrum all across the country. We haven't heard anything from them with regard to their plans. What is your expectation or sense of the house with regard to what their plans would be? Have you had any talks with them? Are they convinced about the technology choice that they need to make?

A: That is what we hear but I am sure that Mukesh won't be happy if I would be doing his announcements of the service.

Q: I am asking you as a technology expert not as someone who knows the company. Purely from a technology perspective, what do you sense?

A: I think they see the same thing, which is the global system is going LTE and that is the place to be if you are going to leverage the mass quantities. They understand that the technology is going though all its check points, meaning that we have done the trials, we have done the demonstrations of our ability and all these things are very interesting because that means the technology is moving towards commercialization.

Q: For all the operators who will be hearing and watching this interview, what kind of message would you have as far as that switch over is concerned? Have all the glitches sorted out; is it going to be a smooth switch over?

A: Yes, I think it will be a smooth handover. When your subscribers move between these things, we need to have this because here there is going to be tremendous demand. As we know, the spectrum that has been allocated both for 3G and BWA is fairly limited. The government is working to get more on line but any individual operator doesn't have that much. So when we will look out and see things like 10-12 X kind of dated domain increases over the next few years, it is a big deal.

Operators need to understand that their consumers are going to try and use these networks for all sorts of internet capabilities including video and gaming and all these things that have very high bandwidth requirements. So they have to make it work so that no matter where they are, the subscriber does not get disappointed.

Q: So this huge data flood that is going to recreated with subscribers pulling more and more data of their network, is that going to put pressure on the networks? What kind of evolutionary steps do they need to take to be able to meet that demand because you are absolutely right, we have seen several operators in India falling behind the consumer curve in that sense?

A: Well the operators absolutely need to get their core networks built out so there is enough data capacity actually going to the cell side and to the antenna. You need to make sure that that's even done well. We have seen operators miss on that in some of the markets around the world. So they need to always keep the latest technology because we really are spending a lot of effort trying to make sure that we can get the most effective networks out there for them, the most efficient radios for them.

So there is not just LTE, there is LTE advanced already going through the standards. There is not just 3G, but there is HSPA plus there is HSPA with multiple carriers, there is e-video with multiple carriers. There are all these new advances going on to try and make it better, easier for the consumer to get more data downloading device and more efficient for the operator to supply that.

Q: You mentioned the limited spectrum that's been granted when it came to the 3G as well as the BWA auction in India. What we are picking up as far as the policy side is concerned is that the government may consider another block or two blocks of BWA spectrum to be auctioned very soon. Would it be the right thing to do? Would there be enough demand? Would companies like yours for instance be interested?

A: Well I think that we are going to need more spectrums no matter what. The timing of it will depend on what timing the consumers come on to these networks. But it's true that around the world we have seen operators running up into spectrum limitations in terms of the amount of data that they can get down to the devices. That's the way it is going to happen.

Whether we would get involved in another auction, that's probably less likely because we really did it first for strategic reason. We wanted to make sure that LTE and BWA was a preferred technology as opposed to WiMax and that seems to be successful. So it's much less likely that we would do that and we really don't want to be seen by our operator partners as getting into competition with them because that was never our intent.

Q: My final set of questions to you and this really has to do with another point and this is the consumer experience. A lot of the time the feed back that we get from our users in India is that the networks perhaps did not deploy enough technology or have under invested in their network architecture because that is why the user experience is significantly bad. Beyond the business centers of the few major towns in India if you go out, you will see a lot of complaints from users that is statistically available as well as anecdotally where people complain about the fact that the networks are under investing. Is that something that you would agree with or is it just because of the fact that there has been a huge explosion in the number of subscribers? There has been a phase of completely un-moderated growth, too much competition that is why this system is creaking a bit?

A: There was book in the United States about technology adoption called 'Inside the Tornado' and it is kind of the same thing here. You see so much demand generate that the networks can get behind and it does take a lot of effort for an operator to roll out a new network. People don't think much about it because they carry their phone with them in their pocket and they don't really think about what it took to get that connection from the device they carry around into the network and back into the internet. There are a lot of pieces there and a lot of it has to do with things that are very mundane like digging up and putting fiber or getting microwave systems in place.

What is good is that they built their networks out so that they have the best radio technology. So the link from your device to the cell site that works quite well and they are going to continue to optimize and make that work even better over time. We come with our teams, we help operators optimize those networks but then it's also the core network, it's the connection from the cell site back to the rest of the network and that's how do you do in some of the rural areas. Just you don't have that fiber out there or those kinds of activity. So it takes time for that to get put in place.

Q: You have been visiting the Indian markets for many years now. You have experience both with the operators and sort of meeting the larger external community in India. We seem to be going through a time where we have seen a lot of crisis and scandal and bad news around the telecom space. Let's keep that aside. Purely from a technology and the evolutionary point of view are you optimistic about the future growth of the Indian telecom sector. Do you think despite everything that has happened we are on the right track?

A: Absolutely. If you look around the world it is going to be India that's going to be leading the world in terms of adopting LTE TDD which is something that the rest of the world is interested in but it is going to happen here first. The reason why that's really interesting is because it is related to internet access. India is well known around the world for the quality of its IT, infrastructure. People here, I think the creativity that we are going to see of application developers, of also local Indian brands manufacturing, trying to manufacture and market the devices - we are seeing all sorts of really interesting things.

The other point is that because of such a price sensitive market it is going to drive the world wide prices of these devices. It has caused us to invest very heavily in high degree of integration in the chipsets. What's also interesting is that we invested early on in very low cost chipsets for the feature phone market. Those very low cost chipsets actually came back to the United States in the form of machine to machine and so the things that happen in India drive change around the world as well. I see that happening in the future, I see it across all of these different angles and so it's very exciting market to be a part of.