It was a brilliant coup in the world of communications technology: Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries can rightfully claim he will usher in a revolution in the way Indians communicate in the not too distant future. Imagine a scenario in which you can download an entire movie on the Internet in a few minutes or download all the encyclopedias in just a few hours. You won’t need DVDs, which might soon get outdated. You will be able to have more data downloaded in far less time. More exciting still, you can use your computer to make phone calls very cheaply. The new 4G — or Wimax, or LTE (long term evolution) — technology will give you access through the Internet to both data and voice — a giant leap from 3G.

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Technology is getting obsolete faster than you imagine. The VCR, for instance, lasted a little over a decade, and the DVD is soon set to follow… Now 3G is in danger of getting outdated in just six months. After 4G, the next big thing will probably have to be something faster than the speed of light! Speed is the name of the game, and none of the other players who bid with such abandon for the 3G and broadband wireless access (BWA) spectrum licences have the pan-India spectrum that Mukesh Ambani’s company now has. And he got it literally for a song — a far superior technology for a mere Rs 4,800 crores, compared to the Rs 10,000-crores-plus that some of the others paid. This is what he shelled out to acquire a 95 per cent stake in Infotel Broadband, that had bid for — and secured licences in — all 22 circles. The others had made BWA bids in just three or four circles. In fact, big names like Vodafone and Reliance Communications had dropped out of BWA bidding as they thought the price was too high and they had already bid a lot for 3G. It was considered by some that Infotel Broadband was acting unwisely in bidding for all 22 circles. Very few people could have had any idea of the much more exciting game being played behind the scenes. The cost of a pan-India BWA spectrum licence was considerably less than that for 3G. Mukesh Ambani must have been watching the bidding by big names at the auction with concealed glee — with hindsight, it almost appears like a Tom and Jerry show. It eventually emerged that the government and Mukesh Ambani were the two biggest beneficiaries of the first-ever 3G and BWA auction. As the RIL boss said later, 3G and BWA promise to be key drivers for rapid growth of advanced services. But 3G is limited to cellphones, while the 4G technology is extremely futuristic. The use of Wimax technology and LTE is relatively new, and not really proven yet. A presentation by RIL noted that only 110 operators in 48 countries have so far committed to deploying LTE; and of these it is operational in only two — Norway and Sweden. Given RIL’s petrochemicals track record, his company might well make India the third country after Norway and Sweden to deploy LTE.

There is some concern in corporate circles that given his monopoly in 4G, Mukesh Ambani’s company could well dictate prices in the same manner that the initial operators in mobile telephony were able to. Way back in the early years of this century, it was the then undivided Reliance that turned the cellular world upside down with its Monsoon Hangama scheme that made cellphones affordable for the lower economic strata. The others simply had to follow if they were to survive. Exciting times indeed lie ahead.