Smarter phones

Mobile phones revolutionised communications in the last decade, bringing basic voice and data access to countless people. The mobile industry body GSMA estimates that there are over 4.5 billion wireless connections worldwide today. As governments everywhere have been discovering, these devices have raised productivity and are driving economic growth. India should now be paying more attention to this sector as the phones become smarter and open up new possibilities. The experience in Haiti showed that these gadgets can save lives. In the wake of the January earthquake, an injured man used an iPhone application to diagnose his condition and apply first aid; a teenager updated her social networking site to tell the world that she was alive in the rubble. These are anecdotal instances, but they are part of a wider phenomenon of a fast-growing mobile web. The mobile internet is powered by high bandwidth networks and smartphones with better display screens and gigahertz processing power. It should surprise no one that the smartphone category is growing 30 per cent year-on-year, and half of all new Internet connections are made using a mobile device. At this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, developers and operators took a step toward consolidation and formed a common platform to write affordable application software for smartphones that can be used across operators and handset models.

The pace of change in mobile broadband should send out a clear message to the government in New Delhi and to the regulators: remove the policy bottlenecks that constrain domestic growth in this important sector. Indecisiveness on policy issues has inordinately delayed full migration from the second generation mobile networks to the higher bandwidth third generation, or 3G. Further delays in awarding licences for 3G networks can only act as a drag on economic and social progress. It is no doubt a positive sign that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has taken note of the apparent lag in decision-making, and circulated a pre-consultation paper on introduction of the next generation 4G network. This new technology is still being refined, but its recent commercial introduction in Stockholm and Oslo is clear proof that mobile services are headed in this direction. It is important to remember that affordable smartphones with the potential to give the end-user greater value and the economy a fillip will arrive soon. They represent the next wave of growth, and everything must be done to facilitate their use.