A notice suspending licensing regulations is expected to be issued this week. A plan to deregulate outdoor use of 802.11b WLANs is also in the works, but may take until the end of the year to complete, said Pramod Mahajan, India's communications and information technology minister.

Also expected is further deregulation of licensing rules for the 2.4-GHz spectrum. Unlike in the U.S. and elsewhere, India licenses that portion of the spectrum.

Mahajan also said he had rejected a proposal to charge a registration fee for indoor use of 802.11b-based equipment, indicating that further deregulation is likely to come gradually. India's tech industry was pleased with the de-licensing move, even though many had hoped the government would go further, faster.

"The decision should enable easier adoption of 802.11b-based WLAN infrastructure," said Srini Rajam, chairman and chief executive officer of Ittiam Systems. "This will drive vertical applications such as home networking, enterprise, hospitality services, airport facilities and the like."

Besides Ittiam, which has developed intellectual property for baseband implementation of 802.11b, Sasken Communication Technologies and Wipro Technologies are among the other companies active in the 802.11b market. Wipro has licensed 802.11b technology to a few customers and is also working on the 802.11b baseband.

Sasken, for its part, has developed 802.11b-based products, and completed system integration and deployment projects. It has two products using 802.11b connectivity and is working on an application of 802.11b for outdoor use, said Rajeev Agrawal, vice president and head of Sasken's Internet access solutions business unit.

Agrawal said the deregulation of indoor WLANs would speed development of new enterprise applications and open up deployment of 802.11b networks. "Outdoor use will still require a license and we hope that the ministry will de-license that too," Agrawal said.

The Indian wireless industry wants outdoor use of 802.11b deregulated soon. But doubts remain, and government notification of a change in policy is anxiously awaited. "I feel that the government should lift all restrictions on the use of 802.11b, except maybe in some sensitive restricted areas," said Uday Ramachandran, Wipro's head of connectivity solutions. "This will enable people to use WLAN on office or college campuses. Also, since preventing RF transmissions from escaping from within a building is not easy, people might end up using it outdoors in any case."

Indoor use only?

The cost of ensuring "that no transmissions escape from within the building" would be so high that customers might "just use a wired network instead," Ramachandran added. "We need some clarity on how exactly the government plans to enforce indoor-only use."

How the government plans to keep emissions from within a building from escaping is not clear, he said. "If I install a WLAN access point inside my home, I can definitely access my network from my yard or from across the street. It is not easy to prevent the RF transmissions from going outside the building or home," Ramachandran said.

Texas Instruments Inc.'s India subsidiary is working on WLAN chips and views the proposed deregulation as progress. "It helps heavy deployment of WLAN cards to the WLAN integrated-circuit designers to try out the technology, understand the features and know systems from the users' perspective better," said Vivek Pawar, general manager of TI India's broadband silicon technology center. "This better understanding will give [designers] valuable insights to develop better features and performance on WLAN integrated circuits."