3G services not been a success so far: Sibal

Communications and IT minister Kapil Sibal today said that 3G services have not been a success in the country so far. "3G has not delivered so far. The operators have paid huge money to get the bandwidth but they are not able to build the required infrastructure due to illiquidity," Sibal said here at the launch of Airtel's 4G LTE services. 3G, or third generation services, which were launched in the country a couple years ago are estimated to have over 10 million subscribers as per global industry body GSMA. The total mobile subscriber base in India is around 900 million.

Sibal said the government was committed to empower people with the help of telecom and whose role would only be confined to that of a facilitator. "We are announcing the telecom policy in May and the IT and electronics policy sometime this month," Sibal said. Referring to 4G LTE launch by Airtel, he said that it was basically Broadband Wireless Access (BWA). "Real 4G will come when 700 Mhz bandwidth is made available. Hopefully we will get by this financial year," Sibal said. He also urged telecom operators to make the security systems impregnable to prevent cyber attacks. "Security should be an impregnable part of the network system. In the absence of it, we will expose ourselves to disaster," he said.