Bangalore, Mar 13 (UNI) To sustain the robust growth being witnessed in the telecom sector in the country and achieve the set target of 500 million broadband connections by 2010, India needs to create a spectrum for operating 3G technology as against the present GSM and CDMA, Qualcomm Chief Technology Advisor Nikhil Jain said today.

Addressing newspersons here, he said that while neighbouring Sri Lanka and Pakistan have evinced keen interest in adopting 3G technology, the Union Government was yet to take a final decision in this regard. He exuded confidence that the Centre would come out with a policy on adopting 3G technology as early as possible.

Outlining the advantages of adopting 3G technology as compared to the present GSM and CDMA technology which offered a wide range of value-added services, Dr Jain said it was cost-effective, innovative and offered multiple revenue streams from a wide range of services and devices. The 3G technology came with proven designs for excellent user experience and operators could deliver cost-effective data and voice services for both fixed and mobile environment.

He informed that worldwide over one billion people were connected with 3G technology through over 150G networks. Many big vendors, including Alcatel, Nokia and Ben-q, were involved in creating and expanding the ecosystem for 3G technology.

Stating that the 3G platform was substantially better than WIMAX, Dr Jain said it would continue to widen the performance gap and had considerably greater device scale than the latter. With the adoption of 3G technology, the cost of broadband access would also become cheaper. It could be upgraded with the existing CDMA technology with little incremental expenses.

With the robust growth in broadband connectivity, urban areas in the country were facing capacity crunch, while the rural areas faced several challenges to get access. The only solution to this was to switch over to 3G technology, he added.

UNI