We at India  have been watching a tag-of-war between mobile operators on basis of voice call and SMS tariffs for a while; it also put its feet in the desk of VAS to cut down the ARPU and net profits of mobile operators in an overcrowded market which brings mobile phones to the masses.

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But we never saw the intense tariff war on internet or data segment in spite of about 373 companies having ISP license from TRAI out of which 99 are category A ISP (i.e. they can offer Internet services over all India). In 2004 Broadband Policy was announced with directions for the growth of Broadband which was defined as always on connection with minimum speed of 256 Kbps. It is fact that on wireline broadband segment BSNL is still the king, making its landline business still viable. But we need affordable Mobile Broadband.

In mobile broadband market we presently have only two technologies available – EVDO from CDMA operators (Tata Photon+, Reliance Netconnect Broadband+, MTS MBlaze, BSNL EVDO and Virgin vFlash) and 3G from GSM operators (BSNL and MTNL covering the nation). Private GSM operators who won 3G licences will roll out 3G high speed data services shortly, as spectrum allocation hopefully will be in coming September.

I am often asked “what to choose 3G or EVDO?” and this question comes only for Internet access while on move, but as I am comparing these two technologies I am covering other conveniences of them also.