Rural Internet Access Cooperative

India has become one of the fastest-growing mobile markets in the world. The mobile services were commercially launched in August 1995 in India. In the first 5-6 years, the average monthly subscribers were around 0.05 to 0.1 million only and the total mobile subscribers base in December 2002 stood at 10.5 million. The subscription base just grew exponentially, reaching to around 2 million per month in the year 2003-04 and 2004-05.

In the mobile telephone sector, growth was sluggish in the early years because of the high price of hand sets as well as the high tariff structure of mobile telephones. According to BBG Communications India, in the New Telecom Policy in 1999, the industry heralded several pro-consumer initiatives. These initiatives pushed mobile subscriptions to pick up. The number of mobile phones added throughout the country in 2003 was 16 million, followed by 22 million in 2004, 32 million in 2005 and 65 million in 2006. The only country with more mobile phones than India' 246 million units is China at 408 million handsets.

India has taken the advantage of both the GSM (global system for mobile communications) and CDMA (code-division multiple access) technologies in the mobile sector.  The mobile tariffs in India have also become lowest in the world. A new mobile connection can be activated with a monthly contract of only US$5. In 2005 alone 32 million handsets were sold in India, and the market is far from being saturated.

While Indian telecommunication networks have been far more advanced than in past decades, as the sophistication of its systems still needs to be improved and its penetration to rural areas could be expanded. By far. about 670,000 route kilometers (419,000 miles) of optical fibres have been laid in India by major operators. BSNL alone, has laid optical fibres in 30,000 Telephone Exchanges out of their 35,000 Exchanges. Keeping in mind the viability of providing services in rural areas, an attractive solution appears to be one which offers multiple service facility at low costs. A rural network based on the extensive optical fibre network, using Internet Protocol and offering a variety of services and the availability of open platforms for service development, which is also more known as the Next Generation Network, appears to be an attractive proposition. Fibre network can be easily converted to Next Generation network and then used for delivering multiple services at cheap cost.

In Next Generation Networks, multiple access networks can connect customers to a core network based on IP technology. These access networks include fibre optics or coaxial cable networks connected to fixed locations or customers connected through wi-fi as well as to 3G networks connected to mobile users. It is difficult to tell whether the next generation network is a fixed or mobile network and the broadband wireless access would be used both for fixed and mobile services. It would then be futile to differentiate between fixed and mobile networks ' both fixed and mobile users will access services through a single core network.