After a long interval of almost one and half years, state owned telecom company Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) has finally revealed its plan of spending a whopping $1billion for its Wimax project.

Plans for providing immediate broadband connectivity through Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access to over 5,000 villages all over the country was sketched out early last year.

The plans may have been delayed for a while now, but this time around implementation won’t be delayed, according to BSNL director, finance, SD Saxena.  He was quoted by the Times of India  as saying the outfit was looking at investing around Rs5,000 crore ($1billion) in the Wimax project. The teleco is planning to launch its Wimax connectivity commercially this year, in urban areas across three states – Maharashtra (including Mumbai), Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. Connecting 5,000 villages might take a little more time.

The telecom operator might have to wait further as it waits for required spectrum for launching its Wimax services. Department of Telecom (DoT) is yet to spell out its policy for 3G and Wimax. Once the policy is finalised, both the state –run telecom operators, BSNL and MTNL (Mahanagar Telecom Nigam Limited) will automatically get spectrum allocation from DoT.

Currently, only two are swimming in the Wimax Pool, namely Reliance and Tata communication. The particular sector will surely interest other telecos, following recent report from Springboard that states India will be the largest market for Wimax with an estimated market share of 35.7% in terms of revenue in the Asia-pacific region and will have 15.8million subscribers by 2012. X

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