“Network not available”: Anyone who has tried to make a call over a mobile phone in Bangalore or Mumbai dreads those chilling words. As India’s mobile market has exploded in recent years to more than 170 million users, and as seven mobile operators compete for that growing customer base, spectrum space has gotten tighter and the quality of service has diminished. As a possible solution, last year the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India began looking into offering third generation, or “3G”, mobile services in India. In part one of a two-part interview, India Knowledge at Wharton spoke with Ravi Bapna — a professor of information systems at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad and executive director of the school’s Centre for Information Technology and the Networked Economy — and Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, about the challenges involved in developing 3G mobile telephony for the Indian market.
A transcript of this podcast will be posted as soon as it is available.
