It has taken 21 years to get mobile phones into the hands of 3 billion people around the world. Reaching the next 1.5 billion, who live in the world's poorest and most remote corners, is expected to take a lot less time but will pose much tougher challenges.
There is, for instance, the thorny question of how to justify the expense of installing transmission towers in areas where people can only afford to pay as little as $2 per month for phone service -- not to mention the cost of running and servicing equipment where electricity and engineers are in short supply.
That is where VNL, a new, privately funded Swedish-Indian telecom equipment maker comes in. Co-founded by Anil Raj, a Stockholm-based mobile industry veteran who held key roles at Ericsson (ERIC) and Sony Ericsson, VNL includes a dozen of the engineers and executives who created the digital-mobile technology known as GSM. They have turned their expertise to the challenge of making mobile networks that are vastly cheaper, simpler, and less power-hungry than anything ever before devised.
The Four-Year Wait is Over Now, after four years in stealth mode, VNL is finally pulling back the curtain. In July, the company introduced its radically new mobile transmission towers -- known in industry parlance as base stations. Costing just $3,500 each [compared with prices typically ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 for conventional base stations] and roughly the size of a laser printer, VNL's base stations are powered by solar energy and use only as much energy as a 100-watt lightbulb. That's one-sixth the amount needed by the most efficient competing base stations that run on alternative energy.
Low prices and stingy energy use are only part of VNL's top-to-bottom rethink of mobile networks. The company's equipment also is designed to be transported in small pieces that can fit into oxen-drawn carts traveling over rough terrain. The components carry Ikea-type instructions that use pictures and color codes instead of text, so that nonliterate people can install the gear. Further simplifying the job: When the microwave portion of the tower is correctly aligned, the base station issues a series of rapid beeps, like the ones trucks make in reverse. Once installed, the base stations can be managed remotely, reducing maintenance costs by 90%, VNL says.
The combination of these and other breakthroughs should mean that, for the first time, operators can build profitable businesses serving the poorest people in difficult-to-reach places, says VNL chief Raj, a former head of Ericsson India and founder of Hutchison India, now the country's second-largest operator. Raj says it is in India -- one of the world's hottest telecom growth markets -- where the limitations of existing equipment are becoming most apparent. There are 700 million people in rural areas there who would be able to afford $2 a month for mobile service, if only operators could figure out a way to serve them economically.
