Air is cheaper than copper or fiber. The economics of wireless technologies will bring the Anywhere Network to parts of the world that would never have gotten it otherwise.  

Yankee Group believes that in the next five years, remaining telecommunications greenfields–parts of the world hardly touched with conventional telephony–will shrink as low-cost wireless broadband changes the game. Take India, for example; its Anywhere Index today is less than 1%. But by 2012, we expect that to rise to 3%, and Anywhere Network revenues (from the provision of broadband for consumers and enterprises) in the Asian region overall to surpass $100B, more than a tenth of the global spend that year. Those funds represent tantalizing near-term opportunities for network builders and operators who come with the right solutions.

But which solution? The battles over which techologies will be part of that expansion are far from over. Intel has been marshalling resources and energy to support the expansion of WiMAX in India, while the Indian government proceeds with upcoming spectrum auctions that could tilt away from WiMAX or other technologies depending in part on the pricing guidelines they set.

Air may be cheaper than cabling, but two network infrastructures of any flavor aren’t cheaper than one. Vanu Bose, CEO of the eponymous Vanu, Inc., is leading a team offering markets like India a different solution, in the form of software-defined radios (SDRs). For markets without an existing wireless infrastructure, the concept is to sidestep fairly political discussions about which 3G or 4G technology is best, instead deploying a technology-neutral wireless infrastructure that can handle several different networking technologies simultaneously. That means that one network could simultaneously support GSM, CDMA, WiMAX, etc.

Reminds me of ‘Babel fish’, the handy icthy-interpreters in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels. I talked with Vanu a few months ago about how it would work in India in particular. He said, ”The value proposition there for rural build-outs is challenging. ARPUs [average revenue per user] are headed down to $5. Will they go to $1? How do you build a network that can make money? The answer is using off-the-shelf hardware, with everything else moved to software. You share one infrastructure, with one set of general-purpose base stations owned and managed by a single entity but running as many as three virtual base stations at once.”

Today in India, Vanu Inc. already works with Tata Communications. Last week, in tight markets for funding, Vanu scored a coup: $32M in new investment. Somehow, India’s citizens will get Anywhere.

P.S.: Come join the debate on where and when 4G technologies unfold — we’d love to see you at WiMAX World USA,  Sept. 30-Oct 2, 2008, in Chicago.